More baubles from my secret mitten…
Yes to the End
I turned fifty this month. YES! The world is getting darker, and my body is getting weaker. YES! Flu has knocked me to my knees. YES! There are people being killed in unjust wars. Children starving. Animals dying. Forests felled. YES! Culture is dead. YES! All my loved ones will die, and sooner than I think. YES! I still have to work for money and spend pointless, spirit-crushing hours in the company of morons who openly detest me. YES! The things I own that I cherish will fall apart, decay, get broken or I’ll have to sell them to keep going. YES! Strange pain, ugly mood, troubling thought? YES! YES! YES!
Not that I like these things, that would be monstrous, not that I don’t want to do something about them, and am not working to change those of them I can… The point, the whole point, is that, ‘by the side of the everlasting why, there is a yes and a yes and a YES!’
Advert on the Tube
Talking of which…
The Rocks Are Watching
Do Not Possess Truth, Strive For Her!
Not the truth in whose possession some human being is or thinks he is, but the honest trouble he has taken to get behind the truth is what constitutes the worth of a human being. For it is not through the possession but through the search for truth that his powers expand, and in this alone consists his ever growing perfection. Possession makes tranquil, indolent, and proud.
If God held in his closed right hand all truth and in his left hand only the ever live drive for truth, albeit with the addition that I should always and evermore err, and he said to me, Choose! I should humbly grab his left hand, saying: Father, give! Pure truth is after all for you alone!
Ephraim Lessing, Rejoinder.
Lessing, in this famous and influential passage, is speaking to men, which is why truth here is a thing, not a quality. Nevertheless, if this kindles flames under your cauldron, it’s because truth in life comes not from the thing you have learnt, or earnt, but from the life you have lived for it. Great people want to live truthfully, not merely know truthful things.
This is why so much art and literature is so shallow and weightless, because there’s no life behind it, it’s just a series of clever things. And it’s why so many artists and writers, equally shallow and weightless, speak, dress, move, sit and eat without elegance, decisiveness and colour. They too are just clever things.
Clever things fear and hate strong feelings and bold actions. They wish to be left in decorous peace, not reminded that their feelings, which they are ashamed of, are suppressed. They prefer not to engage in a lively joust, withdrawing instead to a nice, safe, silent chin-stroking distance. Prod them, and they wilt, or crumble, or go running to the authorities.