Looking Up
Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
Moments ago, I heard a report on NPR's "Weekend Edition" about rampant despair -- and even suicide -- engendered by environmental hopelessness.
It's a very good piece, a reminder to "the left" that there is hubris and presumption on "both sides of the aisle."
"Anxiety And Grief Come With Climate Change"
NPR Weekend Edition
I am reminded of my decades-old outlook that even if "it's the end of the world" (which it isn't... homo "sapiens" has survived a recent ice age whose massive north-south glacier covered my current home just 10,000 years ago)... we should take hope in the Titanic's orchestra which "struck up the band" even as the ship was going down.
Be kind.
We do not know what will happen.
We do know that kindness is always good.
And it is probably true that we are happy to the extent that we are kind.
As you know, no one gets out of here alive.
Even if we're "only" re-arranging deck furniture, we can be "present" to our company - grateful that we HAVE company.
Of courses we have challenges as well.
But wit, wisdom and creativity also come in tow.
And humor.
As CQ just wrote in response to your favorable outlook on the Oaxaca trip: "Looks like it's a party!"
Do we not celebrate our birthdays even though we'll be dead -- perhaps gratefully dead -- in "the blink of an eye."
The play's the thing!
Consider my Berkeley-educated 95 year old Air Force general friend, a prototypal environmentalist, a far left progressive, and a career-long specialist in military intelligence (not to mention visits to 200 countries -- and both poles twice). Arthur once cautioned me to be patient, saying it could take 100,000 years before the world we wanted to see was a reality.
When I asked Arthur what The 1% would do when the coasts are finally swamped by rising seas, he replied -- without hesitation -- "They'll move to higher elevations."
"Higher Love" by Stevie Winwood: Steve Winwood - Higher Love [Remastered HQ] Lyrics - Bing video
"Higher Ground" by Stevie Wonder: Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder LYRIC VIDEO - Bing video
I'll close with an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" (a hundred page book that changed my life).
In the following passage, "The Jolly Giant" elaborates his view that the human condition is -- and has always been -- a shipwreck.
But even so, nothing could be more precious; indeed, the preciousness of human life is enhanced by the wreck.
Chesterton: "Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.
I may express this other feeling of cosmic coziness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence.
rusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.
It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.
Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been. But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.
The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills.
For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one. Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine.
These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now.
I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false.
Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently.
Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons.
Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.
We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us.
And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.
Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck.
All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it.
And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology. (Alan: As a young man, Chesterton was an agnostic/atheist - and a socialist.)
Alan: Here is a PDF of "Orthodoxy" in its entirety: Microsoft Word - Orthodoxy.doc (freeclassicebooks.com)
And here are two more bits I just stumbled on:
And here are my own blog posts about Chesterton:
"Compendium Of Best G.K. Chesterton Posts"
"G.K. Chesterton: On Charity, Hope And Universal Salvation"
Chesterton: "Fairy Tales Are More Than True" (With Follow-Up Commentary By Rev. J. Edgar Bruns, My Most Notable Professor)
Like you Fred, my Dad's favorite bird was the pelican, a bird high on my own list as well.
"A wonderful bird is the pelican, its beak can hold more than its belly can."
Pax et amor
Alan
(BTW... Make sure your passports are valid. Getting a new one could take 7-10 weeks, although you can pay a surcharge for expedited service.)
On Sat, Nov 20, 2021 at 8:01 AM Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:
I am trying to type a coherent message at 6 a.m. I have a new motto, pelicans not politics, on the advice of one of my SMC class mates that I have been watching too much news. We see pelicans almost every day where we live near the beach. They are wise old fools and fabulous flyers, low riders skimming across the wave tops. Heading up the beach or down the beach.In politics, I am happy for Joe Biden. He got his bridges. I love Kamala Harris and her quiet presence.6 a.m. more later
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