"There's no success like failure," says Bob Dylan.
Without ignoring Dylan's next line--"and failure's no success at all"--I want to take failure as my starting point.
A particular failure. I have plenty of successes. I'm relatively well off in a world where many people are not. I get a reasonable amount of satisfaction in life. I'm not complaining.
My failure is the failure to do this...this thing here, this saying of what it is I really want to say that I am initiating right now. In terms of my earliest idea of myself, it is the failure to write the articles and treatises and novels that are clamoring to get out of my brain.
No big deal. A common enough affliction. Every reporter and every cop, never mind every doctor and every cabbie, has a manuscript in their desk drawer. "If only people could read my story..." I publish, therefore I am.
For me the peculiar twist is that from my earliest awarenss I have craved (!) clarity of mind and calmness of spirit. This was precisely because I was a confused, anxious child. Only occasionaly did I have fleeting moments of understanding and peace. As I grew these moments were increasingly bound up in the act of reading. I felt that what I sought must be somewhere on some page. Even more that it was the possession and domain of those who wrote these pages. I wanted to be them.
Strangely, the effect of my quest to find the right words poisoned my capacity to find satisfaction in relationships and jobs. These always disappointed. They also managed to distract me from what I saw as my true work, making the statement that subsumes all previous statements. In my eagerness to own the whole farm I neglected the necessary step of tending my own plot of land and ended up a hired hand.
All has not been lost though. Lately I notice that I am occasionally sought out by students and friends as if I am a source of those qualities I have yet to acquire. It's almost as though, having beaten my head for so long against the walls of that cave in which Plato placed those who see only the illusory shadows of reality, I am able to tell them, "I've been down that path; there's nothing there."
While I credit this to my habits of reading and scribbling, I notice that I am less inclined to want to read every word of every thinker, let alone resolve ever discrepancy within and between them. This is not to make a virtue of ignorance or to disparage those who till the long stony furrows of philosophy (a term I dislike and seldom use). Rather it is that, having approriated a few insights, I now have some of my own.
I still play at the big themes a little: Opinion versus truth. The one and the many. Permanence and change. But I no longer see these as battles to be won. Much better to use them as tools to open minds. For we need nothing so much in these desperate times as to be able to hear each other.
wisdom
folly
success
failure
opinion
truth
inquiry
plato
dylan
philosophy
Without ignoring Dylan's next line--"and failure's no success at all"--I want to take failure as my starting point.
A particular failure. I have plenty of successes. I'm relatively well off in a world where many people are not. I get a reasonable amount of satisfaction in life. I'm not complaining.
My failure is the failure to do this...this thing here, this saying of what it is I really want to say that I am initiating right now. In terms of my earliest idea of myself, it is the failure to write the articles and treatises and novels that are clamoring to get out of my brain.
No big deal. A common enough affliction. Every reporter and every cop, never mind every doctor and every cabbie, has a manuscript in their desk drawer. "If only people could read my story..." I publish, therefore I am.
For me the peculiar twist is that from my earliest awarenss I have craved (!) clarity of mind and calmness of spirit. This was precisely because I was a confused, anxious child. Only occasionaly did I have fleeting moments of understanding and peace. As I grew these moments were increasingly bound up in the act of reading. I felt that what I sought must be somewhere on some page. Even more that it was the possession and domain of those who wrote these pages. I wanted to be them.
Strangely, the effect of my quest to find the right words poisoned my capacity to find satisfaction in relationships and jobs. These always disappointed. They also managed to distract me from what I saw as my true work, making the statement that subsumes all previous statements. In my eagerness to own the whole farm I neglected the necessary step of tending my own plot of land and ended up a hired hand.
All has not been lost though. Lately I notice that I am occasionally sought out by students and friends as if I am a source of those qualities I have yet to acquire. It's almost as though, having beaten my head for so long against the walls of that cave in which Plato placed those who see only the illusory shadows of reality, I am able to tell them, "I've been down that path; there's nothing there."
While I credit this to my habits of reading and scribbling, I notice that I am less inclined to want to read every word of every thinker, let alone resolve ever discrepancy within and between them. This is not to make a virtue of ignorance or to disparage those who till the long stony furrows of philosophy (a term I dislike and seldom use). Rather it is that, having approriated a few insights, I now have some of my own.
I still play at the big themes a little: Opinion versus truth. The one and the many. Permanence and change. But I no longer see these as battles to be won. Much better to use them as tools to open minds. For we need nothing so much in these desperate times as to be able to hear each other.
wisdom
folly
success
failure
opinion
truth
inquiry
plato
dylan
philosophy
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