What do you want?
If one were able to get a handle on that question you suspect most of the problems would evaporate, disappear. Who amongst us knows what they really want? We may want something and wish we didn't; or we may want incompatible things. Is want a simple craving, a visceral feeling, a "blind," wanton desire rushing headlong to its 'object'? Something necessary, something freely chosen? A hierarchy of wants, then? On reflection or with time we realize that what we wanted wasn't really what we wanted or needed, but only a shadow of it, or maybe even a diversion, a false image. How are wants connected to our well-being, to goodness? Do we always want what is best for us?
A great democratic soul that accepts too much, has grown soft, and knows so little: scraps of poems, throwaway lines, half-understood sayings. Is there another kind of craving that has escaped me, another kind of 'food'?
A wife-beater once told me: you have great potential to become a deeply religious person.
If you wrote on a blank piece of paper all your wants would you have a map of who you are?
The river we cannot cross
flows forever.
---Menashe.
Was there a time when we had a sense of the unity of our lives, when were part of some order? Not adventure, but the happiness of ordinary humble men. Is freedom just another word for our 'unknowingness', our unhappiness?..A new consciousness of the depth and seriousness of life, realizing we must make a choice and cannot have everything, that the circle is broken. Lives constrained, constricted, a limited whole in which each aspect was reflected in the other. Mirrors, yes, nothing is the same any more...
I look at myself and, bizarrely, think my face has become blurred, on its way to becoming unrecognizable. Perhaps in middle age it is not easy to see oneself so clearly. You're in the thick of it, but still outside. Your face has become darker (was it ever radiant or is that, too, a trick of the mind?).
A face ageing
to less generosity than it had
---D.P.
You have become less reflective, looser. You want to read without pausing. An Arab at an airport-I forget which- once said to me, out of the blue, "You think too much". I put my book down. "Look at me, I am happy. Have many wives..We, we Arabs are one people."
It did cross my mind. Well, old blood, I guess. But then I asked: "And what about the Shias?" His face darkened. We, to the extent that we're modern, can't deal with happiness or unity very well. They've lost their glow.
Twice in the last week a person has walked up to me and I haven't been able to recognize him till he's right up close. He, too, seems to have a blurred face, or maybe its just a generic face in his case. I think of my own face as if it was in an old oil-painting, becoming less distinct with each passing day, as if a film of dust from God knows where were spreading over it, draining it of any colour and life, then smudged and then turning away like that woman in the Hammershoi...
Some of our wants are delusional, like those for eternal youth, or the age-old desire to turn back the clock, enter a different picture, wiser, less self-conscious. Is part of the human condition, then, to be half-mad? You want to sober up; you want to get drunk.
(citations: R.G. Collingwood..not read, of course!)
If one were able to get a handle on that question you suspect most of the problems would evaporate, disappear. Who amongst us knows what they really want? We may want something and wish we didn't; or we may want incompatible things. Is want a simple craving, a visceral feeling, a "blind," wanton desire rushing headlong to its 'object'? Something necessary, something freely chosen? A hierarchy of wants, then? On reflection or with time we realize that what we wanted wasn't really what we wanted or needed, but only a shadow of it, or maybe even a diversion, a false image. How are wants connected to our well-being, to goodness? Do we always want what is best for us?
A great democratic soul that accepts too much, has grown soft, and knows so little: scraps of poems, throwaway lines, half-understood sayings. Is there another kind of craving that has escaped me, another kind of 'food'?
A wife-beater once told me: you have great potential to become a deeply religious person.
If you wrote on a blank piece of paper all your wants would you have a map of who you are?
The river we cannot cross
flows forever.
---Menashe.
Was there a time when we had a sense of the unity of our lives, when were part of some order? Not adventure, but the happiness of ordinary humble men. Is freedom just another word for our 'unknowingness', our unhappiness?..A new consciousness of the depth and seriousness of life, realizing we must make a choice and cannot have everything, that the circle is broken. Lives constrained, constricted, a limited whole in which each aspect was reflected in the other. Mirrors, yes, nothing is the same any more...
I look at myself and, bizarrely, think my face has become blurred, on its way to becoming unrecognizable. Perhaps in middle age it is not easy to see oneself so clearly. You're in the thick of it, but still outside. Your face has become darker (was it ever radiant or is that, too, a trick of the mind?).
A face ageing
to less generosity than it had
---D.P.
You have become less reflective, looser. You want to read without pausing. An Arab at an airport-I forget which- once said to me, out of the blue, "You think too much". I put my book down. "Look at me, I am happy. Have many wives..We, we Arabs are one people."
It did cross my mind. Well, old blood, I guess. But then I asked: "And what about the Shias?" His face darkened. We, to the extent that we're modern, can't deal with happiness or unity very well. They've lost their glow.
Twice in the last week a person has walked up to me and I haven't been able to recognize him till he's right up close. He, too, seems to have a blurred face, or maybe its just a generic face in his case. I think of my own face as if it was in an old oil-painting, becoming less distinct with each passing day, as if a film of dust from God knows where were spreading over it, draining it of any colour and life, then smudged and then turning away like that woman in the Hammershoi...
Some of our wants are delusional, like those for eternal youth, or the age-old desire to turn back the clock, enter a different picture, wiser, less self-conscious. Is part of the human condition, then, to be half-mad? You want to sober up; you want to get drunk.
(citations: R.G. Collingwood..not read, of course!)
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