Wednesday, September 8, 2010

sight, blindness & purpose

man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). he is much more an experiment and a transition. he is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. his innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. his innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute. "man," whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary bourgeois compromise.

that man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired.

as for the way of true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it is true, an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few hesitating steps and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs of loneliness. but as for striving with assurance, in response to that supreme demand, towards the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going the one narrow way to immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. he knows too well that it leads to still greater sufferings, to proscription, to the last renunciation, perhaps to the scaffold, and even though the enticement of immortality lies at the journey´s end, he is still unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and to die all these deaths. though the goal of manhood is better known to him than to the bourgeois, still he shuts his eyes.

herman hesse.

3 comments:

digital bees said...

An excerpt from the AVClub critique on the most recent episode of Mad Men. I thought it fitting:

"I've recently finished reading Per Petterson's new, wondrous novel I Curse the River of Time, a book about memory and rueful regret, as well as confronting the idea that we will all die. In it, Petterson writes of the moment when you realize that you are dying, the moment before you simply cease to be and your brain is able to register that fact: "I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember." It's a beautiful piece of writing, and it kept running through my head throughout "The Suitcase," an episode full of thoughts on death and change, of course, but also one stuck on that central idea of a suitcase, packed full of clothes, ready to go somewhere new, to a better place, really. (Even Anna carries one as she walks away, perhaps to suggest that this is all a dream Don is having in the murky, late hours.) The long night Don and Peggy spend together seems almost like that better place, a world apart from the one they usually occupy, but the lights come on in the morning, and the guys come in to loudly blow whistles in Peggy's face. Nothing can last forever, no matter how good.

That sense of melancholy, of the world always rushing forward and leaving us behind, is one of the dominant moods of Mad Men. The show's set 45 years ago, for God's sake. It's under no illusions that the world it paints is somehow a good world, entirely, or a better one in any way. The progress we've undergone since then is a good thing, it mostly realizes, but it still longs for reinvention. These are people who long to escape who they actually are and become someone else, but the world carries them ever forward. Over your life, you will become many different people, and the journey from one person to another is one of discovery and excitement. But there are also moments and places where you'll long to return, memories you'll wish to fold up and place in a bag next to each other. And then someday, you'll find yourself no longer who you were, really, and that bag of what you wished to hold on to will be all you have left. And you, too, will head off into the unknown."

digital bees said...

An excerpt from the AVClub critique on the most recent episode of Mad Men. I thought it fitting:

"I've recently finished reading Per Petterson's new, wondrous novel I Curse the River of Time, a book about memory and rueful regret, as well as confronting the idea that we will all die. In it, Petterson writes of the moment when you realize that you are dying, the moment before you simply cease to be and your brain is able to register that fact: "I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember." It's a beautiful piece of writing, and it kept running through my head throughout "The Suitcase," an episode full of thoughts on death and change, of course, but also one stuck on that central idea of a suitcase, packed full of clothes, ready to go somewhere new, to a better place, really. (Even Anna carries one as she walks away, perhaps to suggest that this is all a dream Don is having in the murky, late hours.) The long night Don and Peggy spend together seems almost like that better place, a world apart from the one they usually occupy, but the lights come on in the morning, and the guys come in to loudly blow whistles in Peggy's face. Nothing can last forever, no matter how good.

That sense of melancholy, of the world always rushing forward and leaving us behind, is one of the dominant moods of Mad Men. The show's set 45 years ago, for God's sake. It's under no illusions that the world it paints is somehow a good world, entirely, or a better one in any way. The progress we've undergone since then is a good thing, it mostly realizes, but it still longs for reinvention. These are people who long to escape who they actually are and become someone else, but the world carries them ever forward. Over your life, you will become many different people, and the journey from one person to another is one of discovery and excitement. But there are also moments and places where you'll long to return, memories you'll wish to fold up and place in a bag next to each other. And then someday, you'll find yourself no longer who you were, really, and that bag of what you wished to hold on to will be all you have left. And you, too, will head off into the unknown."

digital bees said...

An excerpt from the AVClub critique on the most recent episode of Mad Men. I thought it fitting:

"I've recently finished reading Per Petterson's new, wondrous novel I Curse the River of Time, a book about memory and rueful regret, as well as confronting the idea that we will all die. In it, Petterson writes of the moment when you realize that you are dying, the moment before you simply cease to be and your brain is able to register that fact: "I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing really to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember." It's a beautiful piece of writing, and it kept running through my head throughout "The Suitcase," an episode full of thoughts on death and change, of course, but also one stuck on that central idea of a suitcase, packed full of clothes, ready to go somewhere new, to a better place, really. (Even Anna carries one as she walks away, perhaps to suggest that this is all a dream Don is having in the murky, late hours.) The long night Don and Peggy spend together seems almost like that better place, a world apart from the one they usually occupy, but the lights come on in the morning, and the guys come in to loudly blow whistles in Peggy's face. Nothing can last forever, no matter how good.

That sense of melancholy, of the world always rushing forward and leaving us behind, is one of the dominant moods of Mad Men. The show's set 45 years ago, for God's sake. It's under no illusions that the world it paints is somehow a good world, entirely, or a better one in any way. The progress we've undergone since then is a good thing, it mostly realizes, but it still longs for reinvention. These are people who long to escape who they actually are and become someone else, but the world carries them ever forward. Over your life, you will become many different people, and the journey from one person to another is one of discovery and excitement. But there are also moments and places where you'll long to return, memories you'll wish to fold up and place in a bag next to each other. And then someday, you'll find yourself no longer who you were, really, and that bag of what you wished to hold on to will be all you have left. And you, too, will head off into the unknown."