What's important in this life

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all. - Leo Rosten

Done the impossible

"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." - Walter Bagehot

Perhaps with the feather bed underneath, just in case

"Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope." Edith Wharton

An Awfully Big Adventure

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” - Helen Keller

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

I know that I have written recently about the idea of change but it is a question that haunts me. There is so much in the world that needs doing and so much apathy solving nothing. I know that it is a terrible trap to think that the world can be "fixed," that someone can can install or strong arm the world into peace, prosperity and happiness. And yet I am nearing my twentieth year of schooling and working towards a PhD in the humanities and would I be more effective working in a soup kitchen or an inner city school, or trying to change policy? I received a pretty clear sign, basically was shouted at, that I am where I am suppose to be. Yet long hours in the library leave me asking existential questions about my purpose in the world.

A few weeks ago in my first year colloquium we had a speaker (one of the professors) taking about the relationship between politics and literature. His point was that politics need not be something forced nor need they be at the forefront of our every thought and action. "We embody what our politics are." In a way the very act of being a scholar is a political act. It has been repeated so many times that it has begun to sound trite, but there is some truth in the statement that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The world has revolved, changed, and convulsed because of the ideas of people whose only claim in life is that they are scholars. The incipient power of ideas is just more subtle and hard to trace than the crack of a gun or even the power of a hot meal. But it is there.

And if our only goal is to take care of the material needs of the world, to make sure everyone is feed and sheltered we are only providing for part of what humanity needs. Not only is thought the only safeguard against abuses of power when attempting to achieve these ends but in addition to basic needs humans yearn for truth. Truth is the end for which we were made and the intellectual life if the pursuit of this Truth.

It can be too easy to forget this when engaged in the too solitary pursuit of knowledge, to get locked in a cyclical and sterile dialogue within the discipline that can never reach the outside world. So I leave you with final words of the aforementioned professor to our class-- in everything "The world should be too much with us--live with some discomfiture in the world."

Shadows of the Past

It has been one year since this blog began, one year since we began this experiment in interaction. Since then things have changed. We are different people, shaped by the irrevocable flow of time. That difference has seeped through into our blogs, our topics, our voice, our presence has changed. My goals now for this endeavor are humbler--while this will always be a way for the three of us separated by time and space and life to keep in touch, to keep the bigger questions which do not always fit into the too infrequent catch-up phone calls in focus, no longer do I see it as a forum where what we shout to each other will affect the intervening distances. Sometime I do not even think that I am having a conversation with you let alone a dialogue with the world beyond. This experiment has been proof that the interweb is too impersonal, too big, too cold, too technological for a real debate. That is not why people turn to the on-line world--it is largely for escapism, for voyeurism, for socially acceptable stalking, for a chance to scream their opinions into the void, and often for a dose of schadenfreude. A genuine dialogue, developing in the void between strangers for no other purpose than to share each others thoughts has eluded us, and may be impossible in this medium.

While this experiment has failed I am not now tempted to take down this blog as I once was. For I have found a new purpose in it--a repository. It is a place where I can fix my thoughts, both in a effort to sort them out and as a record for me as to what issues I was concerned with and what I thought in the past, a diary or letter opened to our little public. It is a place for me to put poems, pictures and mostly quotes that inspire and amuse me. And through this sharing a new dialogue might occur, one less structured and less deliberate than the previous goal, but one occurring through the creation of a shared consciousness. By creating such a trove we at least create a common store of idea, of language and reference from which the dialogue can stem.

So two our 2 readers and anyone else out there who stumbles upon us, I have a favor to ask for our one year anniversary. Please, talk, think, point out something else that relates to what we are saying--respond in someway so we are not just shouting into the void.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

One’s life is a pilgrimage, not a work of art”--John Lukacs

9 to 5 pace

Life less ordinary

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.--Seneca

Life

Children, ye have not lived, to you it seems
Life is a lovely stalactite of dreams,
Or carnival of careless joys that leap
About your hearts like billows on the deep
In flames of amber and of amethyst.

Children, ye have not lived, ye but exist
Till some resistless hour shall rise and move
Your hearts to wake and hunger after love,
And thirst with passionate longing for the things
That burn your brows with blood-red sufferings.

Till ye have battled with great grief and fears,
And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years,
Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife,
Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.

--Sarojini Naidu

There are two sides to every coin

I would like to begin by saying that I agree with everything that Aloysha said in his last post. However, I believe that it is only half of the story. As artists employing the chiaroscuro technique know, it takes deep shadows to bring out the light. The powerful and haunting depictions of humanity present in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, among others, is achieved by their continual awareness of the skull beneath the skin. Silas's exhortation to Bod at the end of The Graveyard Book is made more poignant by the fact that the boy had been raised in a graveyard.

What I am saying, of course, is that people can only achieve the zeal for life that Aloysha is advocating if they keep their mortality in mind. This is what Tolkien meant when he said that death is the gift of the One to Men. While it can be a bitter gift, it is death, the knowledge that time is limited, makes each experience touching and meaningful and focuses people on the moment at hand.

This discussion is especially apt at this time of year, with Halloween around the corner. The origins of Halloween are in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which was their New Year celebrated on November 1st. This feast, coming at the end of the harvest was their way of remembering the year past and preparing for winter which so often brought death with it. They further believed that on the eve of the New Year the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred, and so used this night to remember their dead.

The current issues with Halloween then lie not in their original origins but in the modern distortions of the day. It was not until more recent times that Wiccans and others tried to make it a day devoted to the devil. However, I believe it is the much more common practise of ignoring all meaning of the day that is more troubling. It has become a day celebrating consumerism and promiscuity. As said Cady says in Mean Girls, "Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it." But I will come back to this idea at a latter point.

So my challenge to all of you, but particularly to Alyosha who has a vendetta against the day, is to enjoy Halloween but to use it as an opportunity to memento mori. That knowledge is a gift that will help you truely live.

P. S. The quote of this week is my response to Enjolras first post.