PART FOUR
How is your French? I have been attempting to learn, and have discovered that had I learned it in high school when I had the chance it may be just a little simpler for me now. However, like everything else in my life I chose the High-Road–never went to more than two French classes in high school, which was one more than any math class. Apparently, I went to high school to play football, which cost me my left ankle, right knee, and my gut/pancreas; all that just to ultimately turn down every scholarship that was offered me–that will show them! All my life–”That will show them!”. The irony to it all is that after all the times I “cut my nose off to spite my face”, my nose is gigantic! Scar tissue?
In all the ups and downs while writing this blog during the past year I have had a great time, and I wish to thank you all for accompanying me on this little journey. I have no idea what the future holds, and I am not sure if I will be back here again, but if I am not I would like to leave you with this little bit of wisdom; wisdom, because I learned it from someone else.
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.
“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”
“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”
A.Einstein
That saddest thing of all is that no matter how many times I went the wrong way in my younger years, my children refuse to believe that just maybe I have already been there and know what is waiting for them there. It was after watching my children and talking to hundreds of other parents that have done and watched the same, that I finally learned the reason the Tower of Babel failed. It is the same reason why human beings cannot learn through the mistake of history. If we do not experience personally the pains of defeat we will not completely understand or appreciate the Victory of our Creator.
Thank you all for accompanying me on this fantastic journey! Good-by for now, and may the Lord help us all.
1Corinthians 1:18
Filed under: Uncategorized
