I always suspected that I would never fall in love here. There's too many attractive, interesting people, and everyone is constantly running around, partying, playing games...
It's hardly the environment to find someone exceptional, because there's always the idea you could easily find someone else.
For me, falling in love requires something powerful - the mysterious connection between two people that violently excludes the possibility of anyone else interfering with it. It's that thing people say comes once in a lifetime. You could go on a hundred dates and never find it, or you find it once and lose it, or never notice it even when it's right under your nose.
Is it safe to say we're all too busy for love? Building our own mini empires?
GREAT excerpt that makes fun of American busyness. Mediated pgs 179-181. ..."Nowadays, in our more competitive schools at least, twelve-year-old have appointment books and family lives are scheduled as if they were presidential campaigns going into the last week before an election"
GREAT excerpt about the driftedness after college 182-183
About trying to find your keys "205"
Now I think it's interesting...that the multiplicity of options in the "blob" makes us have to invent ourselves. The focus is on us. Invention is a possibility. We "flatter ourselves" but is it really our fault? How much of self invention is necessary? Biblical? Harmful?
What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.
Americans are generous and strong and decent, not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. When this spirit of citizenship is missing, no government program can replace it. When this spirit is present, no wrong can stand against it.
After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?”
Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation’s grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.
We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another.
Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.
This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.
The Scream, by Edvard Munch has become the universal symbol of the modern condition. These visual rhythms suggest the resonating sound of the voiceless cry described by Munch in the notes to a preliminary drawing for the painting: "I walked with two friends. Then the sun sank. Sudenly the sky turned red as blood. . . . My friends walked on, and I was left alone, trembling with fear. I felt as if all nature were filled with one mighty unending shriek."
"But there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else; having a girl and perhaps one day settling down and raising a flock of Marcia and Sandras and Lindas of my own. Nor is the brokerage business as uninteresting as you might think. It is not a bad life at all" (9).
Sometimes I wonder how humans are supposed to make decisions. I feel like I'm guided by everything, everybody, nothing and nobody.
So at the end of the day, what is it that compels you to do things? The Holy Spirit (and are you sure it's the right one)? The Bible? (which interpretation?) Mentors? Parents? Habits? NY times bestselling authors? Friends? Freudian subconscious psyche... (oh god)...
In historical consciousness, there appears to be two extreme approaches to man's "search for guidance."
1) The first is dogmatic. The socialist, the Marxist, the communist, the Islamic terrorist, and the crusader religionist... all of them sacrifice freedom for the sake of order--whether it's through textual dogma, a vision of a purified race, or whatever.
2) The second is relativistic. These are the existentialists and the Nietzsche supermans who say, "We're really just making it all up." You gotta create your own reality as best you can.
But today I discovered a rich little grain of truth in Genesis that sheds some light on the whole discussion. It made me believe that maybe man was never intended to be held by the hand of God--never intended to be slaves to dogmatic principles and orders, or have one supreme nay sayer about what to do and what not to do.
In Genesis, we see that we were originally created to be "imago dei" decision makers and rulers over the earth. We were glorious. We still are glorious.
BUT, sin has added ambiguity to that authority we were created to exert. We're fallen. We screw it up sometimes.
So the truest description of human nature bridges tensions between our inherent glory and our ruined-ness. The glory part of us wants to rule, but the ruined part of us makes reality, information, and human action distorted, disordered, and confusing.
The problem is...our glory is still rooted in sin and earth.
Nothing will ever seem 100% clear 100% of the time. But we still have to make decisions and exert authority. So I guess we just have to cope with the reality of being glorious and ruined--always hoping for perfection but never expecting it.
