People want sympathy and understanding. But we must be careful how we show them. "I understand exactly how you feel" may earn the response, "You have no idea how I feel, how the hell could you?"
Category: Human Predicament
No Man is a Beast Merely
It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man. He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do. Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.
Obama the Feckless
The weak invite attack. That is a law of nature. Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other. Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism. There is none. Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state. The same goes for diplomacy. There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask. There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.
Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."
Having demonstrated his domestic incompetence, Obama is now showing us his fecklessness in matters foreign. Is it 1979 all over again? As a certain American philosopher of Spanish extraction is supposed to have said . . . .
One can hope that Romney will play Reagan to Obama's Carter. For the good of all of us, those who understand these matters, and the liberal fools who don't.
At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal
And here we have an animal who aspires. Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end. Or so it seems. If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?
Looking Beyond for Meaning
We look beyond the moments of this life for meaning. And we must look beyond the 'moment' of this life as a whole if this life is to have meaning.
Relatives
Some want to stay in touch, not on the basis of what one actually and presently is, but on the basis of what one was or was imagined by them to be. And so I rarely visit the homes of my relatives. For, as Emerson brilliantly quips in a related connection, "I do not want to be alone."
On Living Too Long
Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country. One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.
Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine
Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death. What follows is a post from 13 June 2009.
………………..
Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:
. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.
He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely
warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.
The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.
Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation. The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression. One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust. To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm shows a mind unhinged. Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus. Nunc et in hora mortis.
There is Beauty in the World
I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise. There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it. There is also beauty and nobility in human nature. It peeps out now and again. A young man took a bullet during the Aurora massacre to shield his girlfriend.
It can be a moral challenge to avoid misanthropy. But avoid it we must. The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free. Or is the rosiness of this Arizona sunrise biasing me toward too optimistic a view?
The hardest task in the world is to achieve a just view of things and people and their good and evil.
What is Man?
Peter Geach quotes Tennyson: "Man is an immortal spirit charged with the control and taming of a beast." (Truth and Hope, p. 18)
This Life
We sometimes speak of this life. For example, some assert that this life is all there is. The ability to thematize and question the whole of life may not prove, but it does suggest, that we are more than beings confined to this life. Even the average schlep, enmired in the mundane, his fledgling metaphysical organs numbed by the the onslaught of quotidiana, will at some point, when the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" pay him a visit, exclaim, "What the hell is this life all about?"
Milton Praises the Strenuous Life
Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.
The passage bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's remarks about being in the arena.
I like especially the last sentence of the Milton quotation. We are born corrupt, not innocent. We are not here (mainly) to improve the world, but (mainly) to be improved by it. The world's a vale of soul-making. Since this world is a vanishing quantity, it makes little sense to expend energy trying to improve it: when your house is burning down, you don't spruce up the facade. You don't swab the decks of a sinking ship. It makes more sense to spend time and effort on what has a chance of outlasting the transitory. This world's use is to build something that outlasts it.
But this will, pace Milton, require some flight from the world into the cloister where perhaps alone the virtues can be developed that will need testing later in the world.
Self-Effacement and Self-Importance
To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance? I am thinking of Simone Weil. In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself. "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit my own personal nothingness face to face with Truth?"
The ego, wily 'structure' that it is, usually (always?) finds a way to affirm itself.
Moral Failure
Repeated moral failure has at least this salutary effect: it teaches us to be humble. Moral success can have the opposite effect of conducing toward spiritual pride — which undermines the very success of which it is the upshot. So, while regretting one's failures, one can derive a little consolation from the realization that they are contributing to one's humility.
Adapted from Pascal
There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.