11 September 2012
Driving Obsessions
If you can think of another please tell me. But to my mind, there is no more dangerous, arrogant or obnoxious way of conveying the overriding importance and urgency of Oneself than speed.
10 September 2012
In Crisis Motto
"Keep calm and carry on."
I suppose there's nothing quite like dusting off a quaint old British Second World War morale watchword. And all the more so in time for a London-hosted Olympics. How utterly characteristic, too, of those sturdy, stodgy, unvisionary wartime Brits. Observe - "keep calm" - not a shred of a sense of real glory in them. Or of those things most worth sacrificing in order to win it. Worst of all - and on such a potentially heroic occasion - to remain so punily, pathetically human in their scale and proportion, and perspective, of things. I mean, if monstrous times don't justify becoming a bit of a monster oneself, what does? But then by the same token, don't relatively dull, listless, uncertain times (as our own are often alleged to be) require a that-much-more deliberately disproportionately monstrous energy? And enthusiasm?
So what might be a fittingly dynamic, 21st-century American counterpart - or even rejoinder - to a modestly 20th-century British crisis slogan?
"Get all worked up, and carry it right off a cliff?"
And why not? What's the point of truly believing in (i.e., taking to its limits) anything - even a business model - if you're not prepared go crazy with it? Neither, I'm told, is there anything quite like a serious economic downturn for separating wheat from chaff, men from boys, women from girls, fit from unfit. Perhaps it's time we laid the groundwork for a whole new series of economic paradigms: man-made disaster as the better man's made-in-heaven opportunity.
To do what, you ask? Why, yet further to improve to himself; to extend the frontiers of human (or is it post-human?) triumph over nature; to distinguish the superior man's hardwon greatness from the mediocrity of that always-too-abundant herd which deserves only failure. And as for the general state of the world, surely there's no better raw material for the properly innovative man or woman than a clean slate? Indeed, might it not be reasonably asked (I can almost hear the ghost of H G Wells with his ebullient "Fresh starts! fresh starts!"):
Can the slate ever be clean enough?
So why not just take the whole rotten system and plunge head-over-precipice? Who knows what undreamed-of supercreatures - uh, make that creators - may yet emerge from the rubble?
(NOTE: For those readers as yet unsure of my drift - yes, this was indeed a swipe at not just Mr Hopeful Audacity, but Bush the Younger. And Greenspan. And Clinton. And Gingrich. And . . . )
I suppose there's nothing quite like dusting off a quaint old British Second World War morale watchword. And all the more so in time for a London-hosted Olympics. How utterly characteristic, too, of those sturdy, stodgy, unvisionary wartime Brits. Observe - "keep calm" - not a shred of a sense of real glory in them. Or of those things most worth sacrificing in order to win it. Worst of all - and on such a potentially heroic occasion - to remain so punily, pathetically human in their scale and proportion, and perspective, of things. I mean, if monstrous times don't justify becoming a bit of a monster oneself, what does? But then by the same token, don't relatively dull, listless, uncertain times (as our own are often alleged to be) require a that-much-more deliberately disproportionately monstrous energy? And enthusiasm?
So what might be a fittingly dynamic, 21st-century American counterpart - or even rejoinder - to a modestly 20th-century British crisis slogan?
"Get all worked up, and carry it right off a cliff?"
And why not? What's the point of truly believing in (i.e., taking to its limits) anything - even a business model - if you're not prepared go crazy with it? Neither, I'm told, is there anything quite like a serious economic downturn for separating wheat from chaff, men from boys, women from girls, fit from unfit. Perhaps it's time we laid the groundwork for a whole new series of economic paradigms: man-made disaster as the better man's made-in-heaven opportunity.
To do what, you ask? Why, yet further to improve to himself; to extend the frontiers of human (or is it post-human?) triumph over nature; to distinguish the superior man's hardwon greatness from the mediocrity of that always-too-abundant herd which deserves only failure. And as for the general state of the world, surely there's no better raw material for the properly innovative man or woman than a clean slate? Indeed, might it not be reasonably asked (I can almost hear the ghost of H G Wells with his ebullient "Fresh starts! fresh starts!"):
Can the slate ever be clean enough?
So why not just take the whole rotten system and plunge head-over-precipice? Who knows what undreamed-of supercreatures - uh, make that creators - may yet emerge from the rubble?
(NOTE: For those readers as yet unsure of my drift - yes, this was indeed a swipe at not just Mr Hopeful Audacity, but Bush the Younger. And Greenspan. And Clinton. And Gingrich. And . . . )
27 June 2012
Music Lessons from a Slow Learner
Slim Cessna's Auto Club (live recording) on a Sunday evening.
There's one thing I don't think I'll ever cease to love about "Western" and "cowboy" music. It's something in addition to - though it may well be inseparable from - the yodel-like calls and howls and wails. Indeed, it's the same thing I think I most enjoy in just about every sort of folk music I've ever heard, with the exception of the German, French and northern Italian varieties (excepting, in other words, all that "music of the folk" so-called in which every lapse into a minor key is something on the order of a major sin).
It's the yearning.
Haven't I made myself clear? Then let me try again.
It's the ineffable, lingering, haunting sense that, however much the singer may enjoy his present life, and this present earth, by the grace of everything holy there's got to be a better life somehow, somewhere, somewhen.
There's one thing I don't think I'll ever cease to love about "Western" and "cowboy" music. It's something in addition to - though it may well be inseparable from - the yodel-like calls and howls and wails. Indeed, it's the same thing I think I most enjoy in just about every sort of folk music I've ever heard, with the exception of the German, French and northern Italian varieties (excepting, in other words, all that "music of the folk" so-called in which every lapse into a minor key is something on the order of a major sin).
It's the yearning.
Haven't I made myself clear? Then let me try again.
It's the ineffable, lingering, haunting sense that, however much the singer may enjoy his present life, and this present earth, by the grace of everything holy there's got to be a better life somehow, somewhere, somewhen.
31 May 2012
Road (Re-)Construction Blues
The longer I'm an American, the more I'm convinced of the centrality of a certain, perhaps unduly neglected, feature of our modern work ethic. Modern, I mean, as distinct from our American work ethic of 60 years ago. Or 40 years ago. Or even as recently - if I dare nitpick further holes in the reputation of our once-vaunted New Economy - as 20 years ago.
As usual I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. But I get the feeling that, were this particular feature ever to be accurately enshrined in a tenet, precept or injunction, it might go something like this:
"Remember: Speed isn't just an important thing - it's EVERYTHING. And doubly so when it comes to those bonuses that are the rightful reward of jobs completed well in advance of deadline. In short, it really doesn't matter all that much how often a job gets done over, so long as you do it really, really, really, really fast the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Or . . ."
As usual I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. But I get the feeling that, were this particular feature ever to be accurately enshrined in a tenet, precept or injunction, it might go something like this:
"Remember: Speed isn't just an important thing - it's EVERYTHING. And doubly so when it comes to those bonuses that are the rightful reward of jobs completed well in advance of deadline. In short, it really doesn't matter all that much how often a job gets done over, so long as you do it really, really, really, really fast the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Or . . ."
27 May 2012
A Spirited Rejoinder
Pentecost: Outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
And why HOLY Spirit? For three reasons, mainly.
First, because there are certain creatures in this universe who are, and always will be, and never shall be anything other than, spirits. And yet they are not in the least holy. Or rather, more precisely, they have ceased to be holy - mostly because they think they have found something better than Divine holiness. (And of course there's always something better than what one has been Divinely given - until one finds that the "better" is actually an outcome far worse than one could ever have bumped into round the corner of one's most nightmare-haunted despairs.)
Second, because there are other kinds of creatures in this universe, who are not and will never be spirits, and yet - such is the Divine humility - who can be made holy. And indeed must, if they are ever to find wholeness (which process can be made immeasurably easier by one simple procedure: namely, by firmly shutting one's ears to the entreaties of the first-mentioned sort of creature).
Lastly, because everywhere in the universe there is a ravenous need, across every category of creature however high or low, for One who (a) has all the power that inheres in being spirit and not flesh, (b) stores holiness in unasked-for abundance, and (c) actually shares and even sheds this same holiness to all who ask for it (as opposed to our human custom of hoarding and rationing it). This One also has a very curious kinship with human beings in that, while He is wholly unlike the convoluted mess we've succeeded in making ourselves, He is also like us enough to be the slaking of our every human thirst, and the satisfying of our every human desire.
Upon discovering which, our most common initial response, at this point in the Journey, is to bid the chauffeur a hasty "Drive on!" We humans long ago became much too mature, too ironic, and (ironically enough) too heroically self-determining, ever to be resigned to any merely happy ending to our story. And yet not only is this incorrigibly happy Door still open, but lo, One - upon whom depends the salvation of the entire universe - has already passed through it.
And why HOLY Spirit? For three reasons, mainly.
First, because there are certain creatures in this universe who are, and always will be, and never shall be anything other than, spirits. And yet they are not in the least holy. Or rather, more precisely, they have ceased to be holy - mostly because they think they have found something better than Divine holiness. (And of course there's always something better than what one has been Divinely given - until one finds that the "better" is actually an outcome far worse than one could ever have bumped into round the corner of one's most nightmare-haunted despairs.)
Second, because there are other kinds of creatures in this universe, who are not and will never be spirits, and yet - such is the Divine humility - who can be made holy. And indeed must, if they are ever to find wholeness (which process can be made immeasurably easier by one simple procedure: namely, by firmly shutting one's ears to the entreaties of the first-mentioned sort of creature).
Lastly, because everywhere in the universe there is a ravenous need, across every category of creature however high or low, for One who (a) has all the power that inheres in being spirit and not flesh, (b) stores holiness in unasked-for abundance, and (c) actually shares and even sheds this same holiness to all who ask for it (as opposed to our human custom of hoarding and rationing it). This One also has a very curious kinship with human beings in that, while He is wholly unlike the convoluted mess we've succeeded in making ourselves, He is also like us enough to be the slaking of our every human thirst, and the satisfying of our every human desire.
Upon discovering which, our most common initial response, at this point in the Journey, is to bid the chauffeur a hasty "Drive on!" We humans long ago became much too mature, too ironic, and (ironically enough) too heroically self-determining, ever to be resigned to any merely happy ending to our story. And yet not only is this incorrigibly happy Door still open, but lo, One - upon whom depends the salvation of the entire universe - has already passed through it.
26 April 2012
The Oldest Obsolescence of All
As we all know, these are unprecedentedly fast-moving times.* Hardly a month goes by without some age-old realm of human interest, passion or endeavor - one we might have assumed would be part of of the human landscape for centuries if not millennia to come - being suddenly pronounced redundant (or worst and most mysteriously of all, "irrelevant"), and therewith relegated to the heap of obsolescence and eventual uselessness and utter disgrace.
* Though as I recall we were saying much the same thing about the 1990s, and even more so about the 2000s - until one fine late summer's day everything came to not only an abrupt but a largely unexpected halt (and nowhere, I'm told, was it more unexpected than among those who'd been beating the drum of unprecedentedness the loudest).
But I think it will be an especially sad day when the experts consign poetry to the dustbin once and for all. I say that because for me poetry continues to have an irreplaceable and impregnable niche all its own: Not only are there still so many things it can do with words - to say nothing of ideas - but it goes on doing them so much better than other forms of knowledge or learning. Or even literature.
I'm not sure I can explain exactly what I mean to everyone's satisfaction. Let alone every Christian's. But I will try.
To me, what makes poetry a unique and even peculiar language is, first of all, what it does not do. Or at any rate not very well, or very convincingly. Poetry talks about a great many things; some might even say an illimitable universe of things. But what makes poetry different from other kinds of language we use is not so much the things it talks about, as what it does with them. Poetry does not primarily speak things into thoughts and ideas; or into opinions and heated emotions; or into use and useableness. The way, for instance, our treatises and editorials and training-manuals do. Nor does it principally speak things into abstraction or categorization or manipulation, as do our philosophy, science and engineering. Instead, what poetry does is to take a vast, indeed all but limitless variety of things, and speak them into a rather strange kind of being. Poetry understands, in a uniquely specific and individualizing and even sympathetic way, what it means for anything - or anyone - to be. With all that that implies for every level, degree and kind of creature. Being not just in some theoretical or metaphysical sense, or in the lowest common denominator sense of an atom or quark, but being as it fully encompasses creatures of every sort, including those at the most developed levels of sentience. And pretty much everything about them, too - and particularly those things that are of most absorbing interest to the creatures themselves. In other words, not just their most rudimentary or workaday goings-on, but their most pressing concerns of all. And not only at their birth or point of origin - though that usually is of definitive importance - but at every point and turn of their lives. And most powerfully of all at their point of death.
* Though as I recall we were saying much the same thing about the 1990s, and even more so about the 2000s - until one fine late summer's day everything came to not only an abrupt but a largely unexpected halt (and nowhere, I'm told, was it more unexpected than among those who'd been beating the drum of unprecedentedness the loudest).
But I think it will be an especially sad day when the experts consign poetry to the dustbin once and for all. I say that because for me poetry continues to have an irreplaceable and impregnable niche all its own: Not only are there still so many things it can do with words - to say nothing of ideas - but it goes on doing them so much better than other forms of knowledge or learning. Or even literature.
I'm not sure I can explain exactly what I mean to everyone's satisfaction. Let alone every Christian's. But I will try.
To me, what makes poetry a unique and even peculiar language is, first of all, what it does not do. Or at any rate not very well, or very convincingly. Poetry talks about a great many things; some might even say an illimitable universe of things. But what makes poetry different from other kinds of language we use is not so much the things it talks about, as what it does with them. Poetry does not primarily speak things into thoughts and ideas; or into opinions and heated emotions; or into use and useableness. The way, for instance, our treatises and editorials and training-manuals do. Nor does it principally speak things into abstraction or categorization or manipulation, as do our philosophy, science and engineering. Instead, what poetry does is to take a vast, indeed all but limitless variety of things, and speak them into a rather strange kind of being. Poetry understands, in a uniquely specific and individualizing and even sympathetic way, what it means for anything - or anyone - to be. With all that that implies for every level, degree and kind of creature. Being not just in some theoretical or metaphysical sense, or in the lowest common denominator sense of an atom or quark, but being as it fully encompasses creatures of every sort, including those at the most developed levels of sentience. And pretty much everything about them, too - and particularly those things that are of most absorbing interest to the creatures themselves. In other words, not just their most rudimentary or workaday goings-on, but their most pressing concerns of all. And not only at their birth or point of origin - though that usually is of definitive importance - but at every point and turn of their lives. And most powerfully of all at their point of death.
In short, poetry understands uniquely the language of need. And that even (and sometimes embarrassingly) in those most remarkable and apparently self-sufficient of all God's creatures we know of: Angels and men. Nothing speaks, as the language of poetry speaks, of every creature's need, however "tiny" its capacity, to be loved, to be understood, to be heeded, to be saved. And of course, who can know the utter direness of these needs, or indeed know any of these creatures in themselves, better than their Maker? And after Him, Man - at least in those rare moments when graces, events and circumstances conspire to make him co-operative?
Right now, though, I want you to look again, a bit more closely, at the short catalogue of need I compiled in my third to the last sentence. Review each of these needs in its turn, and see what you make of them. Is it just my personal pique, or are these precisely the same needs in any created thing - the same little rooms, as it were, in each and every one of us - that the proud and prosperous world tends to deem most lowly and humiliating? To say nothing of (most damning of all modern sins) unproductive? To be loved, to be understood, to be heeded, to be saved . . .
"Now you listen here," I can imagine some irreplaceably important person arguing, who's been having all this up to here by now. "It just so happens that I've done and made do WITHOUT these things all my life. And see what I've produced and achieved! Go ahead, search my accomplishments from top to bottom, and see if you find a counterfeit, or even so much as a mere 'credential,' among any of them! Nor did I ever wait for, much less ASK, anybody to understand, or love, or even listen to me. To be honest, whatever I needed I either found a way of getting, or else frankly just went and took. And to my mind, there's no reason on God's earth why every other creature He made can't function in more or less the same way. In fact, if you'll bother to look 'a bit more closely,' you'll notice that most of the SURVIVORS among them do."
(If I may interject, sort of makes me wonder how many breathtaking deeds of extreme productivity - not to mention extreme oppressiveness [and that not just of the shirkers, but even more often of the workers] - have been justified in the pursuit of that modern Holy Grail, survival uber alles.)
But now imagine what may in fact be the supremest of ironies. Imagine these same lowly, yet in their own way lovely, rooms being also the place of our most direct contact with God, and of our most immediate closeness to God. If so, then for me certain conclusions follow. It follows that poetry, at least so far as it succeeds - as it issues in actual poems, and not mere versified prose - can only be a most curiously humble and intimate thing. Certainly in the place where it starts, if nowhere else. And of course, as in everything, it is the freshness of the wellsprings that best ensures the freedom of the stream. My point is that poetry, wherever we find it - and not least where we find it dwelling someplace farthest from verse, and most deeply imbedded in prose? - is a speech unto itself, precisely because it touches us in those places where no other speech can. Not only closest to where we live, but closest to where, it may be, we are least conscious of living, or most in denial of living. Or most apt to have forgotten we ever lived there at all. As with a certain Garden. At all events, regardless of where we stumble on it, or unexpectedly dig it up and dust it off from, poetry always consists of words that have a lilt, music and magic all their own, quite independent and irrespective of the things they talk about. This lilt, music, magic are themselves rooted, I believe, in the poet's power to stir up in us the remembrance of "places" - indelible states of mind and feeling - that we have perhaps largely forgotten; or fled from; or fallen so far down off of that we no longer know how to get ourselves back up. And this power is nowhere more potent than when the words themselves are, as it were, most fresh, and crisp, and clean with the savor of the breath of God. That is, when they're most concerned with those things about us - or rather, with that Everything about us - that our Maker is most concerned with: not our whims, or our wants, or even our supposedly most sovereignly self-creating wills; but rather with those needs in each of us that are at once most basic and primordial, and most final.
To sum up: Poetry is either the language of ultimate need, or it's nothing at all in its own right - nothing that can't be found in some ranting, pontificating newspaper comment or editorial. Or blog. Of all our various languages, poetry is the one most of us and like us, because like us it can no more escape from need than it can escape from God. And - lest anyone think I'm making an exception of the plentiful atheists and agnostics in the field - I believe that's true of any poet's words, whether she knows it (or Him) or not.
You may come up with all sorts of exceptions to my rule. Or even rules of your own that seem to make of my rule one big exception. My question is, in any given creative moment, how can one be sure that the Poet hasn't also gotten through, in one guise or other? A particular writer may hate, or thinks he hates, God. That doesn't mean his Maker is not stirring up His own ancient tongue in some forgotten cupboard of that author's being. I said poetry is the language of need: it doesn't follow that every poet is happy with or reconciled to this need, even as he exhibits or illustrates it. My point is that when it comes to a God as unpredictably persuasive as the One attested by both our Scripture and Tradition, nothing is humanly certain, much less humanly impregnable. Vehement denial of or even opposition to God are no guarantees of immunity to His influence. I've known people whose, as they see it, irrefutable experience of Satan is also one of their most unshakeable testimonies to both the reality and the love of his Enemy. And I imagine even the Devil must bear some trace of his Divine origins; else where would his powers of persuasion be? And if one irrevocably banished from the presence of God can still show marks of His influence and nature, how much more one, like any human poet, whose fate still hangs in the balance?
All the more reason, it seems to me, why we shouldn't be too eager to cast the better part of our poetry into the dustheap just yet. Or even to delete it permanently from every corner of our frantically "Preparing for Tomorrow" curricula. It may just yet have something more to teach us about the finer - or in any case the more serious - things of life. And maybe - who knows? - even be of some last use to us in our more patiently discerning attempts at survival.
Right now, though, I want you to look again, a bit more closely, at the short catalogue of need I compiled in my third to the last sentence. Review each of these needs in its turn, and see what you make of them. Is it just my personal pique, or are these precisely the same needs in any created thing - the same little rooms, as it were, in each and every one of us - that the proud and prosperous world tends to deem most lowly and humiliating? To say nothing of (most damning of all modern sins) unproductive? To be loved, to be understood, to be heeded, to be saved . . .
"Now you listen here," I can imagine some irreplaceably important person arguing, who's been having all this up to here by now. "It just so happens that I've done and made do WITHOUT these things all my life. And see what I've produced and achieved! Go ahead, search my accomplishments from top to bottom, and see if you find a counterfeit, or even so much as a mere 'credential,' among any of them! Nor did I ever wait for, much less ASK, anybody to understand, or love, or even listen to me. To be honest, whatever I needed I either found a way of getting, or else frankly just went and took. And to my mind, there's no reason on God's earth why every other creature He made can't function in more or less the same way. In fact, if you'll bother to look 'a bit more closely,' you'll notice that most of the SURVIVORS among them do."
(If I may interject, sort of makes me wonder how many breathtaking deeds of extreme productivity - not to mention extreme oppressiveness [and that not just of the shirkers, but even more often of the workers] - have been justified in the pursuit of that modern Holy Grail, survival uber alles.)
But now imagine what may in fact be the supremest of ironies. Imagine these same lowly, yet in their own way lovely, rooms being also the place of our most direct contact with God, and of our most immediate closeness to God. If so, then for me certain conclusions follow. It follows that poetry, at least so far as it succeeds - as it issues in actual poems, and not mere versified prose - can only be a most curiously humble and intimate thing. Certainly in the place where it starts, if nowhere else. And of course, as in everything, it is the freshness of the wellsprings that best ensures the freedom of the stream. My point is that poetry, wherever we find it - and not least where we find it dwelling someplace farthest from verse, and most deeply imbedded in prose? - is a speech unto itself, precisely because it touches us in those places where no other speech can. Not only closest to where we live, but closest to where, it may be, we are least conscious of living, or most in denial of living. Or most apt to have forgotten we ever lived there at all. As with a certain Garden. At all events, regardless of where we stumble on it, or unexpectedly dig it up and dust it off from, poetry always consists of words that have a lilt, music and magic all their own, quite independent and irrespective of the things they talk about. This lilt, music, magic are themselves rooted, I believe, in the poet's power to stir up in us the remembrance of "places" - indelible states of mind and feeling - that we have perhaps largely forgotten; or fled from; or fallen so far down off of that we no longer know how to get ourselves back up. And this power is nowhere more potent than when the words themselves are, as it were, most fresh, and crisp, and clean with the savor of the breath of God. That is, when they're most concerned with those things about us - or rather, with that Everything about us - that our Maker is most concerned with: not our whims, or our wants, or even our supposedly most sovereignly self-creating wills; but rather with those needs in each of us that are at once most basic and primordial, and most final.
To sum up: Poetry is either the language of ultimate need, or it's nothing at all in its own right - nothing that can't be found in some ranting, pontificating newspaper comment or editorial. Or blog. Of all our various languages, poetry is the one most of us and like us, because like us it can no more escape from need than it can escape from God. And - lest anyone think I'm making an exception of the plentiful atheists and agnostics in the field - I believe that's true of any poet's words, whether she knows it (or Him) or not.
You may come up with all sorts of exceptions to my rule. Or even rules of your own that seem to make of my rule one big exception. My question is, in any given creative moment, how can one be sure that the Poet hasn't also gotten through, in one guise or other? A particular writer may hate, or thinks he hates, God. That doesn't mean his Maker is not stirring up His own ancient tongue in some forgotten cupboard of that author's being. I said poetry is the language of need: it doesn't follow that every poet is happy with or reconciled to this need, even as he exhibits or illustrates it. My point is that when it comes to a God as unpredictably persuasive as the One attested by both our Scripture and Tradition, nothing is humanly certain, much less humanly impregnable. Vehement denial of or even opposition to God are no guarantees of immunity to His influence. I've known people whose, as they see it, irrefutable experience of Satan is also one of their most unshakeable testimonies to both the reality and the love of his Enemy. And I imagine even the Devil must bear some trace of his Divine origins; else where would his powers of persuasion be? And if one irrevocably banished from the presence of God can still show marks of His influence and nature, how much more one, like any human poet, whose fate still hangs in the balance?
All the more reason, it seems to me, why we shouldn't be too eager to cast the better part of our poetry into the dustheap just yet. Or even to delete it permanently from every corner of our frantically "Preparing for Tomorrow" curricula. It may just yet have something more to teach us about the finer - or in any case the more serious - things of life. And maybe - who knows? - even be of some last use to us in our more patiently discerning attempts at survival.
21 April 2012
The Gift That Keeps On Taking
Whenever you hear people tell you that love is something either done freely, or not at all, listen to them, for they know what they're talking about. It means they've been round the block with it more than a few times.
Whatever else love is or may be, it is not simply (and brutally) a matter of doing more for somebody, and then more and more and more. I can go, as they say, to the ends of the earth for another human being, and then back again, but if I'm doing it chiefly in order to maintain their good opinion of me, or to maintain myself in their good graces, then it's hardly a free act. At least not in the oldest and noblest sense of that word. Which is to say, something done free of charge.
Of course people can play all sorts of games with my conscience: they can try to turn what I could have sworn was a gift into a debt, something I thought I desired to do from the bottom of my heart into something else that was really owed all along. But my love shall dry up at a dismaying rate, if I find myself doing one favor for someone, and then another and another and another, simply in order to assure them I'm not quite as bad as they're always on the verge of thinking I am. And as I know they will think I am, sooner or later. Unless, of course, I keep on doing that thing they expect which I thought was a free act of service, but which "in reality" was merely partial payment for services they rendered "to me."
I'll say it again: Love is either a free thing or it is a miserable thing, which very soon will cease to bear even a shred of resemblance to love. So that, soon enough, I'll have all I can do to keep from hating those who keep escalating their expectations of me. Even as I continue to try to meet those same expectations. Just to maintain my self-respect, of course. Or to ease my conscience.
And needless to say (or it ought to be), the fact that I must be prepared for other people's games with my conscience doesn't mean I'm not playing them myself.
Whatever else love is or may be, it is not simply (and brutally) a matter of doing more for somebody, and then more and more and more. I can go, as they say, to the ends of the earth for another human being, and then back again, but if I'm doing it chiefly in order to maintain their good opinion of me, or to maintain myself in their good graces, then it's hardly a free act. At least not in the oldest and noblest sense of that word. Which is to say, something done free of charge.
Of course people can play all sorts of games with my conscience: they can try to turn what I could have sworn was a gift into a debt, something I thought I desired to do from the bottom of my heart into something else that was really owed all along. But my love shall dry up at a dismaying rate, if I find myself doing one favor for someone, and then another and another and another, simply in order to assure them I'm not quite as bad as they're always on the verge of thinking I am. And as I know they will think I am, sooner or later. Unless, of course, I keep on doing that thing they expect which I thought was a free act of service, but which "in reality" was merely partial payment for services they rendered "to me."
I'll say it again: Love is either a free thing or it is a miserable thing, which very soon will cease to bear even a shred of resemblance to love. So that, soon enough, I'll have all I can do to keep from hating those who keep escalating their expectations of me. Even as I continue to try to meet those same expectations. Just to maintain my self-respect, of course. Or to ease my conscience.
And needless to say (or it ought to be), the fact that I must be prepared for other people's games with my conscience doesn't mean I'm not playing them myself.
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