Wondering

The sheer delight of a child's apperception is based on wonder ; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another...Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilisation based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom. All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total of boredom. Modern people are thoroughly bored....

---D.H. Lawrence.

We have stuffed ourselves with the thoughts of others, dazed ourselves with books. Been there, read that. Tick. Nothing sinks in. You've been to the finest schools and learnt how to 'critique' things, how to 'think on one's own'. At least that's what you were told, what you were sold. We remember all the wrong things. You see a door and stop to think about it. But only by walking through it do you understand what is inner, what is outer, what is the future, what is the past...

A 'knowledge', an understanding that is not subject to criticism or analysis, that isn't reduced to a 'problem' that has to be resolved, that isn't an 'object' of thought, that isn't 'value neutral' or free of regret...this the modern world cannot abide.

A reflective, self-conscious age..a representative age. One that thinks about life without living it, or that lives it -like a revolutionary-without thinking about it. Skill and inventiveness in constructing fascinating illusions..But the present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence.

A reflective age that only seeks mirrors, self-affirmation, that abhors the very possibility of realities beyond the self's narrow confines, that is oblivious of the fact that reason can 'bind' us to one level of reality. Bourgeois sensibilities and a reaction to them is set up: to be or not to be: all or nothing.

The whole age becomes a committee..unable to act decisively, full, bloated with bloodless abstractions and ideas. We have ceased to live soulfully, to live from within. Either the analysis of life or a complete revolt against it in the cult of action and ceaseless agitation is our truth. We fail to see the common thread that unites these disparate approaches but one only has to think that the action is , more often than not, a reaction to stifling boredom, to a leveling down of the spirit, to realise that the desire to flee the heaviness of thought in the leap of action, is , fundamentally, not a desire to re-engage with the world again, but to escape it in whim and fantasy. The world has not known such a radical ascetic as this before...

We are governed by the ethics of the ordinary, the useful. Finally, theoretical discussions are put to one side, they cannot be resolved. Far better to play backgammon. Power, money or happiness are the final arbiters in matters pertaining to truth. And this, it is contended, is a sign of our maturity, our pragmatism! To live without any ideals, without being stopped in one's tracks by the beauty of a face, the sadness of the flowers, the darkness of the trees but, instead, to be acutely aware of our mediocrity and hold that we are nothing but the quintessence of dust, a bare-forked and bewildered animal, subject to the same mechanical forces that distribute atoms throughout the universe. A deformed notion of intelligence lacks beauty. And then we wonder why the modern age is so nihilistic! Having killed 'god' we, we who live in this metaphysical vacuum, now face the greater quandary, wondering how to kill Time before it kills us.

(citations: Kierkegaard: The Present Age)