In Our Time

And I wondered to myself if the loneliness of Man in the world could be overcome by the love of one person for another.

---(from memory) Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca.

Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.

--Hannah.



We live in this time, this place, no matter how much you begrudge fate. There is no stepping out of what has been allotted to you. But the desire remains. No-one can accept 'joy in contingency' or sovereign becoming. No-one can live without bridges (here the Catholics, as in so many other things, understood things better: Auden: Catholicism: the possession of the Truth; Protestantism: the search for it). And yet all that seems deep to us is this longing. Poets can wander; philosophers must sit at home.





The human condition: to escape, to leap, to fall.




Beware false infinities, Simone would say. Or an empty freedom. And yet time and time again we long for that emptiness, to break the desert-idols.




Why I'm not a muslim:



I don't know what a muslim is, haven't seen one. Anyway, they bore me to death with their crab-like behaviour, backwardness, and repetitiveness. 'Outwardly sober' is fine, but inwardly sober is to merely accumulate dust. To be a muslim can surely only mean becoming one? And even here identity would not be the subsuming of other things (class, education, culture, ethnic affinities) to some sort of monistic idea or formula but, rather, a heightening or deepening of those things, and in some cases a leaving open of the tensions between them. Render unto Caesar...But it would also be asking why we need the question of identity in the first place.



Faith: to live in contradiction, to acknowledge the unknown. A leap of faith is not to leave the circle, but to see it as a broken circle, not a recollection but a turning, an orientation, a move to the open and new, unscripted possibilities of the self. To lose oneself and find oneself. To not be one-self. To give and give up, let go, is also to receive.



Possession is only to live, here, right now, with other possessions without claiming or owning them, understanding that they can slip away, can be lovingly passed on. In our own time we understand that:



If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like it hath already befallen others.



---Q: 3:140