Wednesday, April 28, 2010

True Religion

In my experience, most religious practice is self-idolatrous. By this I mean to say that most actively religious people don't worship God but themselves.

This self-idolatry takes many forms, not least among them the invention of a God who is a essentially a grandiose version of oneself: warm, loving eyes; a wise beard; a dulcet voice, etc.

But self-idolatry takes far more destructive forms than God as Wonderful Man. Its most awful consequence is that it turns a person away from others and toward the self. Self-idolatry encourages us to worry about our salvation, to focus on our progress along the narrow path to God. This self-involvement, sanctified and promoted by our esteemed religious leaders (case in point: Joel Osteen), leads us to think that we are, in effect, the source of our own salvation—that our religious destiny is not primarily the salvation of others but the perfection of ourselves.

The most obvious symptom of this anti-religious self-involvement is the link that American Christianity (in basically all its iterations) makes between one's material prosperity and one's status in the eyes of God. If one is self-idolatrous, it makes perfect sense to obsess about one's own perfection. And in America, there is no perfection—perhaps there's no person—without money. We've become convinced that the way to become more god-like is to be prosperous: riches are proof of personal excellence. Thus one's religious life becomes, in effect, an ongoing act of self-promotion. Most religion today, at least in America, is nothing more than a life of material and spiritual onanism.

I know the onanism well. I practiced it through my adolescence and well into adulthood. No doubt I continue to practice it. The greatest benefit I received for my years of practice is that I know how to spot it, if not avoid it.

So the question presents itself: What's the fix to this pervasive self-idolatry, which goes (wrongly) by the name of "religion"?

Since writing "The Religious Catastrophe," I've enjoyed an email exchange with some family members, and they've asked me about my current idea of a truly religious life. By responding to them here, as I've promised to do, I'll likely give the impression that I actually have an answer that's fixed, or fully reasoned, or by which I live. That impression would be false. I don't know what I think. At most I know just what I've said, that self-idolatry is not religion.

Nevertheless, I will suggest a few tentative principles that strike me as reasonable. They arise primarily from the problematic but transcendent ideas set forth in Matthew 25, when Jesus takes the first great commandant—to love God—and the second great commandment—to love one's neighbor—and says, in effect: They are the same commandment. The only way that we have to love God is to love each other. More succinctly: Your neighbor IS GOD.

That principle—and all that it implies ethically, politically, spiritually, materially—is my religion. Experiencing that principle as a true description of who God is and how God exists is my idea of true religion.

So understanding what Jesus means by our "neighbor" becomes our most pressing religious problem. In my view, one's neighbors would include, of course, the illegal residents of Arizona. I'll restrain myself from yet another diatribe against contemporary American right-wing hate-mongering. It's enough to note that the attitude toward those unlike oneself that permeates this country is absolutely a symptom of self-idolatry. If we take Jesus at his word in Matthew 25, our present treatment of illegal aliens is not just unconstitutional but unethical—particularly if one claims to be Christian.

I'd like to see the bumper sticker: Illegal Aliens Are Jesus.

I'll close by recommending a book. I recently finished reading Saving God: Religion after Idolatry, by Mark Johnson, having bought it because I thought by it's title that I detected a kindred spirit. I was proved right. Saving God is sometimes painfully dense—by which I mean overburdened by highly specialized jargon—but reading it is worth the work. It very nicely describes our ongoing struggle with self-idolatry, the ways that ritualized and dogmatic religious attitudes prevent us from approaching God, and the ultimate truth of all religious searching, which is: You live among God; be kind.

Here is but one of many worthwhile passages from the book:
Idolatry [meaning, for instance, the display and worship of idols, the rituals and demands of the priesthood, promises of an after-life, and the threat of the Apocalypse] is, then, invariably the attempt to evade or ignore the demanding core of true religion: radical self-abandonment to the Divine as manifested in the turn toward others and toward objective reality. (24, my emphasis)
I provide that quote as a hint of what's to be found in this fascinating and carefully argued book.

It's also a hint of where I am these days, at least intellectually, still a follower myself, I'm sorry to say, of the religion of self-idolatry. But I'm a follower who hopes to turn from his foolish ways. And hope, as Prometheus knew, is what keeps us going.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

In Cultural Amnesia, one of my favorite late-night books, Clive James calls bebop "the post-war musical development which tried to ensure that jazz would no longer be the spontaneous sound of joy."

He develops this criticism at length in the book's superb essay on Duke Ellington. James's disdain for modern jazz — by which he seems to mean the primary developments in jazz after 1950 — can be summarized in five words: You can't dance to it.

There's truth to that criticism — but not enough to save it from being facile. In the first place, it was never jazz's ambition to be the "spontaneous sound of joy." The fact that jazz managed to be the sound of joy at all, ever, is one of its miracles, given its origins. But those origins ended with World War II, when black America decided — in large part, through its art — that if black people could be called upon to die for their country, their country could be called upon to regard them as human beings.

So James is being both facile and unjust by indicting John Coltrane, for instance, for not giving us dance music midst the dogs and deputies of Selma.

Coltrane was an artist to the extent that he told the truth, and he would have been a liar, at the heigh of his powers, had he merely played joy.

Nevertheless! One must concede that jazz lost its hold on the popular imagination after 1960, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that one of the reasons for that loss was that you couldn't dance to it. Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, the two giants of post-war jazz innovation, did not, for the most part, want to be danced to. They wanted to be heard.


But there was a fellow saxophone player out in sunny California who still played from a need to swing.

Art Pepper, like many of his jazz contemporaries — including Parker and Coltrane — led a broken, desperate life (chronicled in harrowing detail in his autobiography, Straight Life). As a consequence, Pepper left behind a body of work that's tragically fragmented. Yet it's a body of work that calls out to be danced to.

Pepper didn't possess Parker's technical virtuosity (no one did) or Coltrane's artistic audacity, but he had a better gift for melody than either of them and a generosity to his playing that shouldn't be mistaken as a need to please or as dishonest or dated. Pepper's music — often underrated, I suspect, because he was white — is a treasure, and Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, which gives us Pepper in studio with Miles Davis' now-legendary rhythm section (Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones), is a breathtaking moment in the history of American art.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Love Letters

My midnight response to the most recent column by David Brooks (found here) caught someone's eye at the NY Times. On Friday morning it was placed among other highlighted comments and so received more attention than it likely deserved.

But I was clever enough to note this blog's address at the end of my comment, which meant some new visitors. I saw on Friday night that four of them were kind enough to leave a complimentary note.

On Saturday, during my standard post-breakfast Internet surfing, I saw an article at The Atlantic called "Have Conservatives Gone Mad?" I didn't bother to read it. Instead, I clicked back to here and saw that the number of comments on my most recent blog post had jumped from four to eight. More applause! I thought.

Not quite:
Anonymous said...
Commie motherfucker Eric Treanor
Your comment in the NYT article is shit, like you.
If you support Obama and his Regime, you support a Statist authoritarian who is an empty suit who speaks in platitudes who is beholden to the oligarchical collectivists and banking cabals. You are against freedom, liberty and our constitutional republic and the notion that all of our rights are inborn and are given by our creator. Some autocrat in Washington does not grant rights - the constitution simply enumerates them for added protection. The constitution also limits the Powers of the Federal Government yet an expansionist authoritarian view is used in modern times contrary to what Madison had intended. If you support Obama you support the biggest threat to our free will in our history, and when the last bastion of freedom in the USA falls, there is nowhere else to go. 
I will go down HARD to keep fucking scum like you from getting my money and my kids money, fucker.
And:
Anonymous said...
Rat vermin. Unconstitutional. NO, you cant take my money and give it to someone else for a long list of things you say they need. This will never end. And IM busy taking care of my family This is absurd to assault the middle class and the bankrupt states with this aggressive unconstitutional scandalous WRONG legislation. This is meant to lower care standards, it will raise rates, and I will NEVER participate in this communist trash, I will get on a plane to whatever country the doctors are all going to leave for (costa rica) and the major stuff Ill get done there. Ill buy emergency insurance for local accidental stuff. I will never be subjugated by this. And the real kicked, NO OPT OUT, no opt out means its TRASH, congress OPTED ITSELF OUT, but everyone else, no choice? I have a choice, good luck trying to make me pay for this trash.
We are going to repeal it, and then we are going to start tearing down that FDR communist trash, , social security,medicare, etc. Its all going away, you went to far you progressive rat communists,.
Its either ALL ENTITLEMENTS go away or EVERYONE PAYS A FLAT TAX. Thats it, you rats want more, but you pay none of the taxes, check out perot charts for reality. Half the people in the USA pay NOTHING, yet the whine.
http://perotcharts.com/category/taxation-charts/page/11/
Im done. I am totally against ALL entitlements now, EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. You pricks don't deserve it. All of it must go now. No more education subsidy, no more social security no more medicare or medicaid no more SCIP no more anything. You went to far and now you need to see what you already had, you rats!
You bankrupted the country with progressive trash, and now you are chasing all the work and businesses away. When FDR did this trash, there was no women laboring in the workforce, there was no India and China. Now every opportunity you drop due to progressive wealth redistribution will NEVER EVER COME BACK.
Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:
bread and circuses
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81) (c. 150AD)
They are bribing the middle class by using identity politics and bribing us.... WITH OUR OWN MONEY!!!
WITH MY MONEY.
I'm done. You've crossed the line. I need to feed my family, learn to make your own way you rats.
And:
Anonymous said...
I pledge allegiance to Goldman Sachs, and to the conspiracy for which it stands, one racket under Obama, Fascist and indivisible, with slavery, debt, and poverty for all.
Of course one of the points of my comment to David Brooks was that Obama is actually doing less "taking away" from the middle class than Pres. Bush—a point lost on this particular fellow American. (My guess is that all of these comments were made by the same person.)

Anyway, I haven't forgotten my Proverbs: "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him."

I do like the Juvenal quote, though.

Friday, April 23, 2010

TFTD

Flight from a fault will lead us into crime.

—Horace

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Brief Theories of Male Behavior

Chewing Gum: I'm so full of sexual energy that I must find a way to dissipate it.

Wearing a Hat: I would be taller, but I've chosen this height by capping myself with this hat.

Spitting: If I could, I would kill you, as you are trespassing into my territory, but circumstances beyond my control force me to restrain myself.

Shaving One's Head: My baldness is a choice, and not, as you might imagine, a sign of my biological decline.

Gelled Hair: I have the purity of the just-baptized.

Baggy Clothes: Today I'm smaller than usual. Most days my clothing fits me.

Walking Slowly: The rest of you are so unspeakably boring that I can barely manage to function.

Walking Quickly: I'm in such high demand that I've neglected my own life.

Sitting with One's Legs Open: I have no where else to put it!

Sitting with One's Legs Crossed: You're all lucky I'm keeping this thing under control.

Obesity: The body must reflect the scale of one's soul.

Thinness: I forgo the pleasures of this world in pursuit of the divine.

Groomed/Stylized Facial Hair: My whiskers, like everything else about me, reflect my natural symmetry.

Ungroomed Facial Hair: My masculine sexuality sprouts out of me everywhere.

A Clean Shave: I'm innocent of all charges.

Groomed/Shaved Pubic Hair: A king controls the teeming masses.

Wearing Sunglasses Inside: If you'd had the night I had, you'd be wearing sunglasses too.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Ten Great Books I've Never Seen on a Ten Great Books List

Here are ten books that currently receive neither the applause nor the readership they deserve—at least in the United States:

1) Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy. A perfect novella by the greatest novelist in history. Of particular interest because its central character is an Islamic terrorist. And yet it goes unread, it seems, by everyone. Perhaps its Shakespearean evocation of the life, mind, and humanity of a fundamentalist insurgent is too much for us to bear right now.

2) Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz. A comic masterpiece, finally translated, just years ago, directly from Polish to English. Ferdydurke, c'est moi!

3) Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Most sacred to me of all the books on this list, Dom Cassmuro is a heartbreaking look at our impulse to ruin what we love.

4) Light Years, by James Salter. Reviewed here.

5) Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam. The definitive document of life under a totalitarian regime, written by the wife of Russia's greatest 20th century poet. Only by the total absence of privacy and normalcy in life under Stalin can one infer that privacy and normalcy are what this book most celebrates.

6) The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platanov. Reviewed here.

7) The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. A book as delicate as its name—and as it's protagonist, the great German romantic philosopher, Novalis. The tenderest evocation of inexplicable love and of the exuberance of 18th century romantic thought that one can imagine from the pen of a contemporary novelist.

8) Straight Life, by Art Pepper. A musician's memoir that's as honest as his inimitable music, Straight Life is a searing portrait of artistic self-destruction and of the explosive collaborative genius of mid-century American jazz.

9) The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connelly. Written during World War II, this is a beautifully written meditation on the onset of middle-age, on the end of love, and—conceivably, at the time—on the end of Western Civilization.

10) Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin. Better—because more honest—than anything by Hemingway, this tragic story captures the mystery and the grief of forbidden love with devastating precision.

Suggestions?

TFTD

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

— Gospel of Thomas

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

A Brief Theory of Earthquakes

An Iranian cleric explains why there are earthquakes:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/20/iran.promiscuity.earthquakes/index.html

I agree that women cause earthquakes—but perhaps not the kind that he has in mind.

A Heart So White, by Javier Marías

Aside from Saul Bellow, no North American novelist of the post-War era can match the achievements of his or her Latin American contemporaries.

Bellow merged the tough-guy lyricism of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and '40s and '50s Hollywood with Jewish learnedness, comic resignation, and philosophical sophistication. His masterpieces—The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, Ravelstein—give us postwar American English at its apotheosis, an apotheosis made possible by the novelistic genius of Faulkner and Fitzgerald and which coincided with the apotheosis of American power.

Bellow's achievement is easy to miss because his prose achieves art's rarest effect: effortlessness. It's an irony of effortlessness that it makes what the rest of us find impossible seem not merely possible but easy. Great artists are like great athletes in this regard.

Consider this passage from Herzog:
There was a certain wisdom in it, he thought, as if by staggering he could recover his balance, or by admitting a bit of madness come to his senses. And he enjoyed a joke on himself. Now, for instance, he had packed summer clothes he couldn't afford and was making his getaway from Ramona. He knew how things would turn out if he went to Montauk with her. She would lead him like a tame bear in Easthampton, from cocktail party to cocktail party. He could imagine that—Ramona laughing, talking, her shoulders bare in one of her peasant blouses (they were marvelous, feminine shoulders, he had to admit that), her hair in black curls, her face, her mouth painted; he could smell the perfume. In the depths of  a man's being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack! A sexual reflex that had nothing to do with age or subtlety, wisdom, experience, history, Wissenschaft, Bildung, Wahrheit. In sickness or health there came the old quack-quack at the fragrance of perfumed, feminine skin. Yes, Ramona would lead him in his new pants and striped jacket, sipping a martini. . . . Martinis were poison to Herzog and he couldn't bear small talk. And so he would suck in his belly and stand on aching feet—he, the captive professor, she the mature, successful, laughing, sexual woman. Quack, quack!
I'll bypass the impulse to celebrate this passage line-by-line. (The ellipsis, by the way, is not mine but Bellow's.) Suffice it to say that damn near every paragraph in the book is this good: funny, dancing, kinetic, muscular, erudite, mournful.

Put another way, this brief excerpt contains all the effects of Bellow's celebrated contemporaries—Roth, Barthelme, Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth, even Morrison—without breaking a sweat.

Where the rest of us strive for style, Bellow writes.

Which brings me to Javier Marías.

I picked up A Heart So White after reading that Roberto Bolaño considered Marías Spain's best living novelist. He might be. He's a hell of a writer, and A Heart So White is a beautifully crafted novel. It negotiates the public and private spaces of our lives with elegance and philosophical brilliance. It's not afraid of novelistic fireworks, and I heartily recommend the book.

But let's not confuse Marías with Bolaño. Bolaño, had he lived, might have equaled Bellow's oeuvre, and with 2666 Bolaño did something for world literature that Bellow did not attempt.

Marías, on the other hand, is a stylist. He's a craftsman. He's a rhetorician. He has labored his novel into existence. In this regard he's like Don DeLillo, who is a formidable novelist but can be frankly difficult—or, more to the point, tedious—to read after Bellow.

Here, for example, is the opening sentence of Marías's A Heart So White. You can hear the carpenter's hammer:
I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn't a girl anymore and hadn't long been back from her honeymoon, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father's gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests.
There are traces, I think, of Bolaño's effusiveness in Maria's prose, so it's possible Bolaño learned something about effusiveness from Marías, who preceded him—and now, tragically, succeeds him—as a novelist. But Bolaño's effusiveness rarely—almost never—feels like a rhetorical strategy. It feels like the way that the world, as constructed by contemporary Spanish, comes into being. Like Bellow, Bolaño rallies all the resources of his particular language in order to fully, effortlessly tell the world.

As with sports, so with prose: the question to ask is, Who makes it look easy? Bellow made modern American English prose look easy. Bolaño has done the same with prose in contemporary Latin American Spanish. Marías, for all his brilliance, does not make novel-writing look easy. Instead, he makes it look stylish.

TFTD

It’s up to all of us to tell the truth—to say what we know, to say what we don’t know, and recognize that we’re dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case, and to the extent that people lie, ultimately they are caught lying, and they lose their credibility. And one would think it wouldn’t take very long for that to happen.

— Donald Rumsfeld

Monday, April 19, 2010

A Brief Theory of Change

Ignacio Padilla, from "The Crack Manifesto":
I believe that all ruptures, from the most quotidian ravings to the bloodiest and most radical revolutions, don't come from ideologies, but from fatigue.
(Original: Creo que vienen todas las rupturas, desde los más cotidianos desvaríos hasta las más cruentas y radicales revoluciones, no por ideologías, sino por fatiga.)
I've translated fatiga as "fatigue"—the obvious choice. It could also be translated as exhaustion or as weariness. Padilla suggests all three ideas by using, within the paragraph from which I've extracted this quote, cansancio, fatiga, and agotamiento.

Anyway, he's contemplating the history of literature and arguing that what leads to changes in art—in life!—is not, as one might expect, a shift in one's ideas, but nothing more nor less than weariness—cansancio.

Above, I've linked a translation of this absolutely fascinating text. A cursory look suggests that the translation is filled with errors. Case in point: in the quote I've included here, the translators translated "revoluciones" as "resolutions"—an indefensible choice.

If you're lucky enough to know Spanish, the original can be found here. (Oddly contaminated with textual errors itself.)

Sunday, April 18, 2010

A Co-Conspirator Offers "Advice for the Lovelorn"

Now and then I'll cruise through my list of co-conspirators, just to see what they're up to. This afternoon I found this, a charming consideration of the similarities between writing and love:

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2010/04/advice-for-the-lovelorni-mean-writers-3.html

Idiots, Continued

In The Big Short, Michael Lewis paraphrases Charlie Munger, a former partner of Warren Buffet: If you want to predict how people will behave, look at their incentives.

So the stupidity of Wall Street can be explained by the stupidity of its incentives. In effect, the employees of Bear Stearns were paid to not know what they were doing. What should have been plainly obvious was precisely what they refused to see.

In the short term, their stupidity made sense: it was making them rich. But in the long term, it destroyed their company, and a lot of other companies, and deeply wounded the economies and the stability of world civilization.

Idiots?

Yes. But idiots like all of us.

Idiots like the ideologues on the right and on the left who simply refuse to listen to anyone they might disagree with. They have sacrificed their curiosity in pursuit of incentives which, as they see it, their ideology protects.

Idiots like the religious folks—including the atheists—who won't listen to a scientist or an historian or a theologian who might challenge their own convictions, for fear of what they might learn.

Idiots like all of us, sacrificing our curiosity on the altar of our incentives.

This type of sacrifice is easy to explain. I lived it, and live it still. Like the millionaires on Wall Street, I've guarded my incentives by refusing to learn anything that might threaten them. For more than half my life, for example, I didn't want to learn the truth about Mormon history. I was aggressively incurious about it.

But consider my incentives! Love and acceptance by family and friends, membership in a (now) global community, intensive schooling, the years of my youth given to the cause . . . those incentives were my identity. Together they made up a concept of myself that discouraged me, even forbade me, from learning things that might threaten it. Then who would I be?

For the first 25 years of my life, those incentives were decisive. I clung to my incuriosity—the same kind of incuriosity Lewis discovered on Wall Street—and I enjoyed formidable benefits. Only now, too late, can I see that I suffered uncounted losses.

In my late twenties, when the incentives changed, I changed with them, and I changed what I learned to justify the pursuit of my new incentives.

Voilà: a fews hours with some original Mormon documents (now available in seconds online) showed me that much of what I'd learned about early Mormon history was either an outright or radically distorted. A few months studying evolution and physics transformed my ideas about my body and the universe. A few years spent reading history's great theologians (and not a collection of goodhearted provincial businessmen) reconstructed my understanding of religion, ethics, and the nature of faith.

The point's made easily enough. Friends and family members don't read this blog because it says things they don't want to hear. They have, as they see it, no incentive to listen, and many incentives not to listen. I'm guilty of the same incuriosity. I have no interest in their religious literature, their political emails, in the accounts of their children's baptisms.

In the end, the idiocy of Wall Street is our idiocy. The only way to overcome it is to ask ourselves: Are the incentives we're pursuing worth the death of our curiosity?

For the gamblers on Wall Street, the cost is now easy to assess. For us? Perhaps more difficult.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

The commonest love story might be: She thought he was a bad boy. In fact he was an idiot.

I confess that I started The Big Short hoping to finally read a carefully researched indictment of all the bad boys on Wall Street. But as the book proceeds, you realize that the millionaire financiers of Wall Street are not, for the most part, bad boys. They are idiots.

Or not: they're smart enough, after all, to be in a business in which idiocy doesn't matter, because you will be rescued from it, again and again, by your neighbor, the American taxpayer—in order, ironically, for him to save himself from what you've done.

So in that regard the idiots on Wall Street are craftier than the rest of us, who gamble, when we can afford to, in Las Vegas and Atlantic City and Reno. Wall Street's idiots don't gamble with their own money. They gamble with everyone else's, pay themselves extravagantly for the privilege (the more absurd their bets, the more they pay themselves), and when they lose everyone but them pays.

And we do pay—most recently with our jobs, our homes, our economic futures.

When the girl next door gives herself to a bad boy, we can admire, at least, the romance, the danger, the high-spiritedness of what she's done. There's no romance, though, when she gives herself to an idiot. So The Big Short, and the subsequent crisis it explains, is not romantic or even especially sinister. It's just really, really sad.

Friday, April 16, 2010

TFTD

Nothing is, but what is not.

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Value of Secrecy

In a man's life, there are moments of which he can speak and moments of which he cannot speak.

The world will try to draw from him especially those moments of which he cannot speak. And ultimately his idea of himself—his actual self-esteem—will depend upon his ability to give to the world what belongs to the world and to keep for himself what belongs to him.

The Religious Catastrophe

The non-believer doesn't object to belief; he objects to certainty.

When a child is told that he knows what he doesn't know, the child bypasses an essential stage in the development of his humanity. Substituting the security of knowledge for the authenticity of experience, the child never learns confusion, wonder, curiosity, doubt. He never enjoys an awareness of his own stupidity. That awareness softens a person, humbles him, and gives him the sense of humor that will permit him the kinds of recklessness (intellectual, physical, emotional) from which he can acquire wisdom.

From that recklessness he might also acquire a religious sensibility grounded in humility, which is a prerequisite for kindness, the stated goal of all religions, everywhere. (The Dalai Lama: "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.")

The religious catastrophe—a catastrophe, too, for religion—is that men learn to think they know what they don't know. So they don't know how it feels to actually know something, how it feels to love knowledge.

As a result, they see knowledge as a source of power instead of a source of delight, and they turn on the world, intent upon making everyone else into mirrors of themselves, crusading slaves of certainty.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

TFTD

What can be communicated is not worth lingering over.

— E.M. Cioran