It happens agreeably enough to this maxim,the Whigs are
friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.
---from Hazlitt
It seems (or I find) the most useful definition of Man is that he is without definition.
---after Hazlitt
Well, yes, there's something a bit fishy about people who want to talk about "the soul" and all things deep and profound, or who always complain about the prosaic nature of the world and its duplicity, her masks; they are, instead, greatly animated and at the drop of a hat ready to swoon like lovers in a tryst of mutual self-negation or like teary-eyed patriots before the flag.
Like Americans who want to reestablish America's 'moral authority' or Christians and Muslims who see life as one steady but uneasy falling away from some intitial pure state, every change speaks only of decadence, and time itself is the great carrier of this disease.
The changeless as an ideal; religion and tradition as a closing of the circle of possibilities.
4 comments:
Initial pure state? Where was that, I'd like to ask "those people".
The idea that "times are a changin'" and things are always worse than they were. As though people are born further and further from this ideal.
So silly.
Reminds me of the man I talked to at the concert. But, that's another story for another time. Suffice it to say, just like humanity will always be changin' she'll also always be stayin' the same.
yes, we so dearly love to complain about 'the world', particularly here in north america, as if 'the world' has materialized out of thin air. we don't love as much to talk about how much of this 'world' is also maintained through the small, apparently value-free acts of our day to day lives.
fl, hello!
I think it's at least worth considering that we are drawn to the origin in many ways -at least historically, if not psychologically. I mean, it would be hard to understand the recurrent idea arcadia or the golden age or the cult of the ancestors, Eden etc if that wasn't the case.
Also, the idea of a return (to home, to our first questions) also seems to be part of what we're about. In some sense,then, I would say the notion that we live in 'linear' time is something quite new.
What seems destructive is the lack of balance. I think what we need is really a broken circle.
anyway, that's my two cents.
Yeah, what is that concert story? Do tell.
best wishes,
b.
yes, mani,..I like this idea of the world being sustained, nurtured, by our acts, by our acting in the world.
What I find disconcerting is the sort of gnosticism that goes: the world is either everything or it is nothing. 'Mani'!
If we could understand this then everything would become not so much about looking and acting but acting in the right way, looking in the right way. A proper 'love of the world', no?
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