The biggest difficulty of my life is knowing when, where and how I'm going to retire. Like most Americans, I've inherited the idea that the privilege is something I should expect. But like most of the haggard detectives in police dramas, there are days when I'm willing to risk it all for a last desperate act of brave integrity, knowing it will doom my security. Of course the decisions placed upon my head are not so dramatic. Nevertheless, the ducks and fish are calling out to me and I don't know how to hunt or fish.
I began reading Maps of Meaning last night, and already I am tiring of Jordan Peterson's voice. He's not dispassionate enough for me to disambiguate his knowledge from his speculation from his personal experience, but I understand why he would read the book himself. Simultaneously, I am reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, and I'm beginning to think of him as a skinny man, and not a fat man, but certainly not an athletic man. He's Baldwin's white boy up in Harlem. How long has it been since thoughtful people gave up on ESP? Was Huxley duped by the Amazing Kreskin of his times? I want to understand what it is that thoughtful people do at the end of their cranial abilities. How quickly do they admit to the existence of magic? Or do they simply admit the mystery and tentatively accept a supernatural explanation? That's what C S Lewis did. I think he did so within reason, and so did Tolkein. The question is how readily do the masses accept their dramatic analogies teleologically? I think about it in response to my daughter's admiration for last night's theatre excursion to Jurassic World, that childish moral tale of human hubris and greed. Another movie with 1 and two halves men, in a cast of hundreds, among which are the beasts who always know which bad guy to chomp while letting good little children escape. The world of melioration is but philosophical cosplay.
All this is to say that as I grow weary and age, at some point I face the probability that I will go all mystical and foggy. I will feign incapacity in the realm of the practical, because I will have begun to bathe in the soft salted baths of indifference instead of the bracing ice water of ambition. I don't have a reason why, and even the loss of my own soul doesn't seem worth the effort. I have lived for others too long. As much as I desire my distance from the incompetents and slothful, their plight still brings me to tears, and I don't feel sorry enough for myself. I don't hate the poor because of their poverty. I'm just not sure I can get used to the smell, nor can I encourage them through direct speech. Who am I? The tangent of my ambition is metaphysical. Worse than Hamlet is the student of Hamlet. Maybe that's what Huxley and Nietzsche discovered, and so packed up and went East.
I'm going to go downstairs and fix up a batch of tea and microwave some frozen sausage. And I'll take a vitamin. This is all the profundity I'm worth today at 210 pounds.
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