I originally meant this letter as a comment to Peter’s Engagement post. But since he scolds me every time I meaningfully comment instead of using a new post, here it shall stand on its own:
Engagement
I couldn’t do it, Viktoria said, writing to me about how I feel compelled to engage with the world as it is, the world of work and corporate life. There is, I think, more to it than that. I live in places which are “normal,” like San Antonio and Seattle. I don’t live in paradise outposts in Maine or rural Ontario, or live in less prosaic but nevertheless lovely and spectacular places like London or other major cities where everything is there for you, where you can detach from normal existence while still enjoying the benefits of cosmopolitan wonder. I don’t even live in Philadelphia or Manchester or Tampa, where the world blends into a kind of stable mix of paradise and normalcy, where the food is good or the sun shines but the housing is subpar and the urban planning is rubbish and most people still dream of the places where it all seems sterling, where people dream of London and Maine in their different ways as benchmarks, as marks of what should be. Continue reading “Engagement”
Incomplete koan
My son read me a story on Sunday night, from an illustrated book entitled Zen Shorts, by Jon Muth. His mother and he had stumbled across the book on the weekly trip to the library. The book is meant to grant children a window into Eastern philosophy, and it involves a trio of kids who befriend a wise panda bear named Stillwater. To one of the children, he tells the following tale (with full attribution to Mr. Muth): Continue reading “Incomplete koan”
On success
The notion of “success” and “failure” has been swirling around my reading lately. It’s not intentional; in fact, the intentional reading I’ve been doing is a bit strange, all relating to late colonial road trip chronicles in Africa. At the temporary apartment I rented last month in San Antonio, I found a book from 1941 entitled Behind God’s Back, by a fantastically named journalist, Negley Farson, about an extensive trip through mostly sub-Saharan Africa that he and his wife undertook in 1939. That inspired me to look for other pre-independence travelogues of Africa, and I stumbled upon Inside Africa, by an intrepid American journalist, John Gunther, who went with his wife for a year-long adventure across the entire continent, this time from late 1952 to 1954, just as the independence movements were really starting to take off.
On failure
She knows there’s no success like failure/ And that failure’s no success at all.
I was fifteen when I first heard these lyrics, although they had been written more than a decade earlier, during the miraculous mid-60s, when Dylan released an album every year, each one full of greatest hits. By the time I discovered his music he was playing in a large band with backing singers, and some of the immediacy and tenderness of his early love songs was lost from the music; but never from the words.