Referential Notes:
"Of itself, knowledge is
worthless; hunger for understanding...and thence to wisdom." (page 37)
"Be mindful, therefore, of all the
doleful battalions, formed on trust and love, fearful that their anguish be in
vain, angry that it could ever be so, deployed for profit, consumed by time,
vanished and unrewarded. They are a chorus, as in Sophocles or Euripedes,
intoning a dirge of solemn memories, a litany of lamentations. Theirs are the
delphic voices, foreseeing and forewarning, theirs the Dies Irae." (page
42) Tisth, A.R. Ancestral
Admonitions: Symbolism, Serenity and the Psychopathy of History. Portland: Singularity
Press, 1964. Print.
Marriage is largely a therapeutic
exercise. You judge yours to be successful when at long last you arrive at a
point where you are, all things considered, more or less whole, more or less
content, yet unable for the life of you to figure out just who cured whom and
of what.
(Elaboration 1.0)
Psychologically speaking, being elected
to govern in America is much
like being commissioned to teach a common language at the University of Babel.
E Pluribus Unum. We've got
the "Pluribus" part down pat (no one can say that Americans don't
understand diversity). It's the "Unum" we seem to be having trouble
with...
...and for us, for those of our mind,
the only possible bedrock principle of that unum? That we
acknowledge as our common creed a faith at once the most profoundly religious
and least dogmatic, least denominational of all of history's endless fumblings
toward the divine, a faith as blind as our yearning for justice, as directional
as our understanding of hope. Freed by our insistence on the absolute necessity
of an authentic self, a singular soul wrested from the clamor of the social
mass, we deploy the right to a will thus won to navigate toward a distant and
anonymous light, the endpoint of evolution.
We are the children of a too rational
age. Blinded by the Enlightenment, seduced by its goddess, awestruck by the
liberties it birthed and comforted by the material wonders it has produced, we
find ourselves nonetheless savaged by reason and confined by its science.
Reason by itself is insufficient for the navigation we have determined to
undertake, inadequate for our polar star. Proceeding as it must from fact to
fact, building thereupon to create still newer facts, reason unrestrained and
untempered can yield only its own endless self justification. It can have no
object but its own infinite elaboration. Ultimately tautological it produces
only classification and hierarchy. Thus, while giving every impression of
movement, it is essentially static. It is movement we seek and insist upon, a
genuine change of state, a birthing into the world as new creatures, remade of
our freedom's victories. And reason of itself neither guides us nor
propels us there.