I happen to be in the middle of this thing myself. I'm not sure that I can learn my way out of it. Well, that's sort of the dilemma I am trying to describe. What happens when you try to learn your way out of a problem? You become vulnerable. You risk self-destruction. You invite self-destruction.
It seems to be ever a fundament of the human condition that we are unsatisfied. And sometimes that dissatisfaction is the dissatisfaction of one's knowledge or more more specifically of one's worldview. It has always fascinated me that the human mind doesn't halt when it contradicts itself in the way we expect perfectly logical computing machines to. We are particularly adept at adaptation. When we arrive at a situation in which our prior knowledge presents us with an impossibility, we figure a way to rationalize what's going on. We disbelieve what is in front of us. We do just about everything but freeze in our tracks, immobilized by the recognition that what stands before us defies all of our experience.
Speaking for myself, I waste a great deal of my time in life foolishly anticipating that moment of impossibility and live in a sort of contingent present - discounting the moment. And at the same time I am arrogantly in the moment asserting myself as if I couldn't possibly be wrong, forcing everyone else to prove my way isn't correct. It is contradictory behavior. I can remember what prompted me to start behaving this way. It was a quote by Einstein. The gist of it was this:
Isn't it fascinating that life has a beginning and an end so that taken together it can be seen as a work of art?
I very much liked the idea that a finite human life struggles for its own internal consistency, and that at some level of perception might be like a snowflake: individual, beautiful, comprehensible. So I owned my own life that night, a sophomore in some dorm, convinced that it was worth something even if I might never know what that something was.
But examining one's life, from time to time, and comprehending it honestly, moving forward along the logical and honest arc of experience is not a smooth curve. It has dislocations and discontinuities. It moves forward through time, but not necessarily in an orderly fashion. Sometimes you stop and wonder if you've been doing it right at all.
I am on the verge of giving up the conceit that my life has any meaning whatsoever. It is the result of a number of simple things that I will only be able say in retrospect formed any pattern. And without trying to justify, by merely observing this process in myself, it brings up this notion of vulnerability that I'm on about this evening.
I find myself this evening staring at some extraordinary full color pictures of Hitler days. In particular I found an extraordinarily beautiful automobile, the Mercedes-Benz 770K W150 that he used in parades. It certainly must have been something of a shock to millions that their entire concept of the world was wrong - people capable of producing extraordinary examples of ordinary human achievement. In other words, life's work. A life's work can be misspent. It brings me back to 2003 and my discovery of Conservatism - this whole new way of dealing with my recognition of what Stalin had done.
And in those brief days as this thing was happening to me, I had no idea, not even that I would be vulnerable in any way. It merely seemed that I had broken through some barrier of naive or arrongant youth. But now I like to think that I was just turning in another direction, a liberty, a luxury I had and still have - to reconsider the lessons of life, make adjustments and to start anew with confidence.
So today I am thinking very much about Doc's admonition about talking about the future. Don't say what you're going to do, just do something and tell people what you did. I am trying still to learn the lessons of kings, but why? I guess I'm just curious, and maybe that's good enough.
Recent Comments