The Forgetting of Being

I returned to this book, half not knowing what to expect. I rarely complete a book -I'd like to think of Dr. Johnson here, but it's more a case of Franzen's 'Perchance': who, today, can read linearly ? (C is an exception, of course). I've started but I won't finish. Perhaps it is nothing but the desire to leave things open, incomplete, undefined. Scatter brains. More likely just a case of old fashioned Kashmiri laziness. And to re-read a book is almost tantamount to sacrilege, as if one could repeat the pleasure of it, fix it in one's memory.

But we do that all the time. This wyrd compulsion to repeat, to sift out all that is important from the flow of words and life and monumentalize it in a text, a recording, an 'image'. The set phrase, the cliche..well-worn talismans of the forgetful, of those without a legacy.

I often wonder why the swami has turned the corner of this particular page and not another. Sometimes I trace the marks she has left around certain passages, certain words with that thick, blunt pencil of hers. If one could reconstruct these select turns of phrases,make a coherent story out of them, I suspect one could picture a certain style of soul.

A stream of images and words passes across the film of our eyes. Strangeness is registered. Two worlds collide. The eye blinks. The work is done. And now, and now, and now.

"...[E]uropean sciences which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation and put the concrete world of life , die Lebenswelt, beyond the horizon..the more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly he could see the world or his own self"

"Man is bound to the world like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension"

"all that is human carries the seed of its end in its beginning"

The thinking self, alone in the world, is the beginning of the existentialist hero. To live with doubt, the wisdom of uncertainty, as opposed to a particular type of religious thought which is reductionist: the saved and the damned. Isn't that why the mullah is so fat? He has no courage!

"In the course of the Modern Era Cartesian rationality has corroded, one after the other, all the values inherited from the Middle Ages". But the victory of Reason ushers in the possibility of all sorts of wild irrationalities. "The fanaticism of an age without God..anything can be considered a value". Paradox of paradoxes: the sleep of reason brings forth nightmares. What now can stop the onslaught, the blizzard that's starting up, must one despair at the loss of values, the reverence formerly felt for the cosmos..the pleasure of the world (Arendt)?



"Man is caught in a veritable whirlpool of reduction, where the world of life is fatally obscured and being is forgotten."

The world is the same old world, and we who are in the world all think alike. I'm sure I've read that somewhere.

What does reading do? Help us forget or help us remember? Protect us from the 'violence from without' or remind us of the loneliness within? The least we can say is that the word is the spirit of continuity, of memory, desire and hope. The world is a concept.

Lightness (I need Calvino here):

"What possibilities remain for a man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight?" A question to the scientists: if there is only causality, what of freedom? [Titmuss would say: the market extends choices in one direction but it limits them in another. If altruism is one principle of action, if we grow by giving, then the market is indeed a constraint on what it is to be fully human..globalization is, then, not the opening of the world but a closing of it..what possibility is there left for escape? Levinas: Gagarin, on returning from the limits, says: there is no god here. From here on in, we face the universe alone.]

And in the race for lightness, to divest ourselves of our past, our memory, we have crossed the fateful boundary. There is a lightness out of profundity, and a lightness out of despair. "The lightness of existence where there is no eternal return", no cosmos, no marking of our words ("mark my words, Ubo would say), no inscribing of our acts in the divine book (Jonas).


Vertigo

"He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down"


How to end this post? Lest we forget, the question is how to begin... to understand what is meant by half not knowing...

(citations from Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel)