I have great ideas, few words and a low drive to write. There are many books in the self-help section of life that say that discipline is destiny. If you are not disciplined you will not get anywhere. It is true in general, but this idea is not new and certainly not enough to categorize anyone as a self-help guru of life and human behavior. As Theodore Dalrymple says in Life at the bottom, every defense mechanism used by modern psychology appears in one way or another in Shakespeare. In scene II of King Lear, Edmund says “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star ”
This paragraph dismantles the western welfare state in which no one is to blame for anything. A bunch of enlightened intellectuals, including psychologists, self-help gurus, yoga teachers in tight leggings, special educators, and a huge highly educated administrative system tells people at the bottom how to live life because … they need help from those who “know”.
When I’m lazy I go to my notes. My notes are…words that I have to look at in the Dictionary, statements that call my attention or ideas to explore further … all of them coming from the books passing through my hands.
I remember that Francisco Umbral said “Man is an animal made for adoration”. It is true, if you want to be successful with an idea you have to turn it into religion, into dogma, into an irreplaceable and salvific truth (see global warming)… he also said in Mortal y Rosa that “A firm lie advances far more than a thoughtful truth”.
I meet Manuel Vilas who in Alegría maintains that “the condition of a father is that of a beggar of love” and that “only music has the legitimacy to put an end to silence”. Pio Baroja agrees with Vilas and in El mayorazgo de Labraz, he says “In the depth of the man’s soul there is sympathy for music”.
But when the music ends, Cardinal Sarah in The Power of Silence says “God Our Father does not allow himself to be approached except in silence” and I think he is right. Silence is an inner encounter with nothingness, which is the immensity of the whole. And this reminds me of what Fernando Aramburu says in Self-portrait without me “I have no more soul than to be alone”. Funny how you end up in the same place when you think about the self, even if you come from very different places.
And that idea of the sublime and terrifying in the search for God… is a constant that goes from Rilke in his Elegies to Duino, Elegy I “because the beautiful is nothing more than the beginning of the terrible” goes through San Juan de La Cruz in The dark night of the soul “In the happy night, in secret, when nobody saw me, nor did I look at anything, with no other light and guide but the one that burned in my heart.” and continues with Martin Heidegger in Being and time “Consciousness speaks only and constantly in the modality of silence.”
This concept of fear and time, the Germans enclose it in the word Torschlusspanik, which is something similar to “panic at the closed door” or “panic before the door closes”.
In this I remember Pío Baroja in The concerns of Shanti Andia who says “the past is nostagia and the future is anxiety”, in his book of essays Yesterday and today, following that skepticism of his about the human condition, he says that “We all have a set of lies that provide us with shelter from the coldness and sadness of life” and that “everything that does not count on time runs the risk of being sterile”. This relevance of time Schiller in his Letter XI qualifies it by saying “time is the necessary condition of all processes that come to be”. Alvaro Mutis tells us that Maqroll the gaviero views time with a certain disdain “There are things that come too soon and others too late, but we only know this when we have already bet against ourselves”
Closing the circle, and in tune with Dalryimple, Baroja says that “Today nobody has their own ideas. Books are not read slowly and well”… my notes take me to Thomas Merton in The Seven Storey Mountain “Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi” “Let it be the end of the book, not the end of the search”