What I Wanted to Be a Really Good Blog Post but is this

For the past couple of weeks I have been wanting to write a really good blog post, partially because I'm supposed to be doing so many other things, and partially because I feel like I have something important to say, but I'm not sure what it is. So I have not written a really good blog post.

I read Notes from the Underground a few weeks ago, for the first time. It was probably something I should have done before, because I was in the familiar position of having to face one of those obvious truths of the world that you sort of know and everyone else knows but you all of a sudden have to admit. The list of these things is long, and includes things that seem really dumb to me when other people worry about them, but then at some point turn out to be legitimate, or not legitimate but unavoidable, things to worry about. So in this case it was that human striving seems fundamentally flawed, as the attainment of all our goals would be a disaster. The whole nature of humanity is involved with the building of things, and they are less than useless after they are built. The problem is boring, as I said, and you can just read Notes from the Underground if you are curious. The fact that the book was written with a view to making such a view unattractive is somehow not helpful. It still seems like there's not a lot of point in giving micro-loans to the poor to bring them into a home-owning middle class, when the next step is to despise the empty materialism of the middle class they've gotten into, and well-provided-for middle-class kids just do drugs and shoot their classmates. The answer can't be, I don't think, that the main thing is to stop paying so much attention to society's material needs, but to increase appreciation of art and literature or something. Art and literature have no meaning apart from human imperfection and striving. Michaelangelo's David is all very well, but you only need one of it: it's not usually about perfection.

The point, though, of one of the things I wanted to say, was that that all that doesn't matter. But everyone already knows it doesn't matter, obviously, because they go on working for things and wanting to attain goals and ideals. So I'm not sure why I'm so anxious to reassure you, but I am.

Because even if the good has no permanent reality that is evident in human life, the bad does. Vanquishing evil has to be meaningful, no matter what other evil immediately appears in its place. I think there is probably a philosophical argument to be made about the true ontological existence of evil proving the existence of good, but I don't really care that much. It's very funny how happy I was, sitting in the window seat in the Thunderdragons classroom at naptime last week, when I remembered the unmistakable reality of evil.

The second thing, which I remembered yesterday, is that the summer before my freshman year in high school I lay on my bed at my father's house one night, wide awake, on the blue-flowered sheets with the itchy lace border, and I thought that if I made the varsity field hockey team, as it amazingly looked like I would, if that astonishing trust were actually vested in me, I knew I couldn't say that I would never want or ask for anything again, because I saw with the logic that sees farther than the imagination that I would, but I promised I would never forget that once, in that little room with the lights from the gas station coming through the window, I hadn't been able to imagine making any further demand on the universe. And I would never look back later and laugh at my self, or act like any more adult issue that may have arisen since that night made it any less true.



In a not-very-amazing coincidence, the book we're reading this week for my religion seminar is Ernest Becker's Escape From Evil. All I've read so far is the preface, but it looks so awesome. The ambitious statement of mission: "In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil."

Two final, unrelated notes, but related because they have put me in a very good mood, as have the previous two subjects: 1) I have spent the past two days listening to Steve Earle sing "Sparkle and Shine" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As0XCEjFxpQ; start at 2:00), and 2) I was very flattered that so many people came to my symposium presentation.