I see you Kevin

 

Dinesen/Blixen

 

 

Your race is appallingly alone in this world, No other mammalian species. No other ambiseuxal species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as pets. It must color your thinking, this uniqueness. I don’t mean scientific thinking only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers — it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.

 

— The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.

 

 

 

 The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

 

 

Rollo May on Kierkegaard

We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present.

I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish. 

 

Washington's body organized the space around it, as a dancer's arms or legs seem to stretch beyond the tips of the fingers or toes. When he entered a room or a crowd, he was noticed. 

 

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them. They go in, fold their hands, look around their feet, sing songs... and when they come out it's usually me they find. I've picked up a lot of business on this spot. 

 

This salutary multiplicative destruction had been a plank of Mondrian's theory almost from the beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The life that you seek you will never find:
when the gods created mankind,
death they dispensed to mankind,
life they kept for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for any lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies. 

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. 

Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement.

 

 

Looking for Greta's bathroom, I went into the first one on the right, attracted by all kinds of pleasant smells. The glass shelves were loaded with bottles of cologne and perfume, and there were soaps of all colors, bath salts, and oil beside the tub—and an electric razor. Wrong one. I thought, this is George's bathroom. I tried the opposite one. This was Greta's all right; her swimsuit was hanging on a hook. Otherwise the room was practically bare: a toothbrush, a comb with a couple of teeth missing, half a bar of Lux soap.

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? . . . But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?

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Nowadays I eat at the hour the Greyhound does.

And in the evening, when he feels ready for sleep, he will drift silently to the table where I work, and lower his tired head onto my hand in order to stop me. I know this is for comfort, needing something warm and human for security, a faith in another. He comes to me even with all my separateness and uncertainties. But I too wait for this. As if he might wish to tell me about his haphazard life, a past I do not know. All the unrevealed needfulness that must be in him.

 ...and I learned the final lesson, the learning of which separates us from innocence. That there was no safe space, that the monster was always at the gates, and a little of the monster was within us too, we were the monsters we had always feared, and no matter what beauty enfolded us, no matter how lucky we were in life or money or family or talent or love, at the end of the road the fire was burning, and it would consume us all.

Life in the Gardens had always been somewhat reminiscent of Rear Window. Everyone looked out and across at everyone else, all of us brightly illuminated in our windows, which were like miniature movie screens within the larger screen, playing out our dramas for our neighbors' pleasure; as if the actors in movies could watch other movies while those other movies also watched them.

 

But to give up on his need for excess, for the immense thing, the thing that made him feel like a surfer in the snow, riding the crest of an avalanche's leading edge! To say good-bye to that need would also be to accept that he was, in the matter of desire, agreeing to be dead. And when the living agree with themselves to be dead, with dark fury begins. The dark fury of life, refusing to die before its allotted time.