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| QUOTATIONS 987-1004 |
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| 987. No matter how creative an artist is, like the rest of us he cannot escape the limitations of his particular personality. On the contrary, the more unique as an individual the artist is, and the more original is his talent (for in an artist the personal uniqueness and creative originality are inseparable) the more all his creations carry the immediately identifiable imprint of both. And in the best this distinctness of character and talent is so highly pronounced that one can always recognize the work, say, of Verdi or Mozart even when listening to this or that particular piece for the first time. But the other, the negative side of uniqueness is its inherent restrictiveness, for it contains within itself its own boundaries, stepping over which leads inevitably to the loss of this precious originality that makes a great artist. And since these boundaries put a natural curb to the diversity, both in form and content, of work the artist is capable of producing, the reader, the viewers, the listeners, who are forever looking for the new experiences, will eventually be driven away even from their most favourite poet, composer or painter. For sooner or later there comes a moment when it is impossible to deny any longer that "once you saw (or read, or heard) one , you saw them all". Thus, it is not the fickleness of the spoiled public but the creative limitations imposed on any artist by his unique personality which are ultimately responsible for the constant search of the new talents and corresponding abandonment of the old and familiar ones, no matter how good and creative they still are. Does an artist have any protection from this "worse than death fate"? Ideally, the capacity to reinvent oneself again and again, without losing one's essential uniqueness, would have been the perfect solution. But I, for one, have not known a single artist who possessed such a multiple creative personality. The more practical answer to this intractable problem of unchangeability of an artist is "changeability" of the public, i.e. as the old admirers go on to seek new talents, the artist keeps acquiring the newer and newer public hitherto unacquainted with his work - the situation which is not altogether unfamiliar in other kinds of human relations. And those artists who are successful in this last undertaking are eventually rewarded with the highly coveted honourable appellation - Classics. 988. There are two kinds of unhappy people. The first are pained by what had been or is being done to them, the second are miserable because of what hadn't been or isn't being done for them. And while it is relatively easy(or at least possible) to rectify the first situation for it requires only the termination of the ongoing activities the second is much more difficult to ameliorate since in this case something new must be originated which always demands more initiative to be displayed and more energy to be spent. What further complicates the relief from the second kind of unhappiness, which presumably is caused not by the presence of "evil" but by the absence of "good", is the multiplicity and variety of what different people consider to be "good", plus the universally acknowledged fact that quite often, while experiencing Lockean "uneasiness" we, not really knowing its cause, are at a loss to imagine what can take it away. And finally, since the satisfaction of the majority of our desires, even when we are perfectly certain about what we want, depends on the willingness of the others to accommodate us, this in itself often creates the insurmountable obstacles on the road to the happiness of the second kind. 989. To tell someone rushing through the flower garden "to slow down and smell the roses" may indeed be a sensible suggestion, but don't give it to the one who's trying as fast as he can to get out of a garbage dump. 990. God must really have a wicked sense of humour by subjecting "his chosen people", the Jews who, according to the Old Testament, persistently defied him, the immaterial and transcendental deity, to the continuous persecution by the Christians, who in the ironic twist of fate came to claim the lowliest of the Jews, widely despised and hated itinerant beggar and former carpenter Jesus to be their, made of flesh and blood, God. 991. If I was asked by a budding bigot (which is highly improbable, considering my ethnic status) how to achieve with the minimum of efforts but with the maximum of certainty the success in such, for our times, both promising and uncertain career, I would have suggested first of all to be very careful when picking up the intended victim. For the surest bet for the one to have a long and promising future in this, now growing but somewhat tarnished and increasingly perilous occupation of bigotry is to choose the potential target which is the least capable of retaliation due to its traditional reputation for meekness and defenselessness. The American Blacks had been taught by their own experience this lesson the hard way, and when they felt it is their time to join the racists they have chosen the Jews (surprise, surprise), as the safest and proven by the long history of persecution with impunity by just about everybody to be the most obliging victims, as the main target for the nascent but rapidly growing Black racism. 992. The best proof for the truth of this famous pronouncement "there is nothing new under the sun" can be found in the kind of words we use today to lament the moral decay and disintegration of the civil society in our times, e.g. the words like Crime, Punishment, Theft, Robbery, Murder, Rape, Adultery, Homosexuality, etc., etc. For none of these and similar terms are new and, as a matter of fact, had been in usage for centuries, if not for millennia. And since the words are introduced into the language to give the names to the already existing phenomena, their durability is undoubtedly the result of their capacity to aptly describe the types of human behaviour which has been with us for a long, long time, and that indeed "there is nothing new under the sun". 993. Government, if judged by the typical behaviour of the rank and file of its first line of defence, the governmental bureaucracy, could be compared to the casino's slot machine programmed to give a thousand of negative responses to every positive one. And a solicitous citizen, like a gambler in a casino, not only has to feed it with countless " quarters" of request and supplications but has also just about as many chances "to win" i.e. to get from the government officials what he is asking for. Now, to be fair, the majority of the people one encounters in life react not that differently when asked about some favour. Even if it costs them next to nothing to grant it, whenever they feel to be in a position to give or not, their first, almost automatic response, is also typically negative. And usually it is the sense of some moral obligation or fear of being perceived as unfriendly and unsociable, and not the natural inclination, that force them to satisfy, at least partially, the solicitations by the others. And because almost everybody behaves in such a manner, it is widely accepted and considered to be "normal" not to take an anticipated "no" for an answer but to ask for what one wants again and again, and there are very few people, regardless of their social position, who feel that such "begging" is below their dignity. Looking for an explanation of such an universal phenomenon it would help perhaps to remember that even a king was once a child and as such had to ask his parents or guardians for a permission to do or to have this or that, and being undoubtedly denied at least some of his wishes had to, in a rather undignified for the future king manner, be persistent in his requests, which is but a begging by other, more respectable name. And if the king had to and probably still occasionally does it, so much so is the rest of us who like him were accustomed through childhood and adolescence to be persistent to get what we wanted. And growing up, in this respect, hasn't changed a thing. For in most life situations most of us are still in a position of a child who has to depend on the whims of those with power for the satisfaction of his needs and wants. 994. The main problem with ever increasing productivity - this golden calf of modernity - which simply means that the fewer people can produce now as much or even more than the larger numbers could have done before, is that the people who are made redundant by this process are not going anywhere and, at least in a industrial welfare state, still have to be taken care of, i.e. to be fed, housed, educated, treated for medical ailments, etc. Furthermore, such a constant increase in productivity, combined with the rapid growth of population, brings about the kind of the reverse Malthusianism, when the shortage of work and not the scarcity of food (at least not yet) is quickly becoming the principal plague of our times, with the psychological starvation for a meaningful life replacing more and more the physical hunger as the leading cause of human suffering. 995. What the old are craving most of all for and what, at the end of the day, is their only real satisfaction, others being gradually denied them by irreversibly failing bodies, is the acknowledgment by the young that the old age brings with it a special knowledge and wisdom, which youth is simply incapable of yet. And this acknowledgment, and hopefully the accompanying it respect, provide some kind of compensation for everything else that used to make life worth living when one was younger. Consequently, few things make the old people angrier than the denial by the young that the long life has any advantage over the short one in terms of knowing what is right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral, etc., etc., and that the opinions of one just beginning to live are as valid as of the one whose life is drawing to the end. For it makes one feel as if one's life has been largely wasted, that nothing of the true value has been gained, and that after all these years of struggle and suffering one is as innocent of worldly wisdom as the babe unborn. And nothing could be as devastating to the old as this. 996. One who has suffered, both objectively and subjectively, a lot as a child from the inherent in this stage of life powerlessness, and as the result has developed as the primary motivation for all his subsequent actions the need to avoid at all cost of ever being put in a similarly humiliating position again, usually comes to believe that what separates men from boys (or women from girls) is finally acquiring the power over other men or women, for without it such a person never feels fully grown up. It is not surprising then that having equated the adulthood with power these people begin literally to measure the degree of it by the numbers of their subordinates, like an army officer who having a thousand men under his command feels to be more of an adult than one who has only hundred and less than one who has ten thousand. The same attitude could be observed among the teachers, business managers, politicians or any others in similar positions, when one is telling the others what to do, instead of being told what to do by the others. Yet, despite the enormous power some of these people sometimes possess, because their particular sense of adulthood depends on the willingness of others to obey, and not on the inner certainty, they are never completely sure of it, and consequently view any act of insubordination on the part of those in their charge (and sometimes even of who are not) as not being taken seriously and treated as a child. But since that's what they are most ardently trying to escape, their anger with and even hate of such a "rebel" could be boundless and they will usually use all means at their disposal to subdue or destroy this present reminder of their previously inferior position of powerlessness. 997. No matter how old we are, the wise by their superior knowledge and insight make us feel again as children. Yet everyone responds to such a sudden regression differently. The reaction and corresponding liking or disliking of the wise for causing this involuntary, albeit temporary, transformation depends largely on one's personal experience as a child. Thus, not surprisingly, those who have fond memories of their childhood, undoubtedly as the result of being brought up by loving and caring parents, are actually glad to relive it, if only for a moment, by letting the wise to play a role of a benevolent parent and themselves of a loved and cared for child, especially considering that the adult life seldom if ever affords us the realization of such a phantasy. But those who remember their childhood as the time of being abused and neglected spend the rest of their lives trying to forget it. Unfortunately, they could become sometimes so paranoid about it that any thoughtful remark or opinion expressed by others would reawaken the bad memories. Consequently, they often tend to perceive and interpret, however mistakenly, somebody else's wisdom as an attempt to reduce them again to the miserable status of a powerless child, and transfer the anger and hate they had previously felt toward the tyrannical parent unto such a wise person, no matter how innocent of these sinister intentions he or she would actually be. And although many will ostensibly profess delight in finally finding in a wise person the "real" parent they always wanted to have, this is at best is a self-delusion - for beneath the thin veneer of acceptance and gratitude lies the never resolved resentment and bitterness toward the one who"treats you as a child". It could be especially upsetting to someone having the power over many, for the one who had achieved such a position quite often has done it to overcome the sense of powerlessness he had suffered from as a child. And suddenly the thoughtful and witty comment made by another man brings home (at least in his paranoid imagination) the fact that in comparison to some men he is still a child, and therefore nothing has changed and all his life and efforts were in vain. And for that he wants to destroy this wise man, and given the opportunity often does. 998. Yet another good thing (not too many, not too many, so none should be dismissed) about growing old - fewer and fewer people resent less and less you being wiser than they are, attributing this to the old age (the state they will surely reach someday), rather than to you being smarter, a kind of permanent, hopelessly unbridgeable gap. 999. No matter how ostensibly "nice", observing the etiquette of the "polite society", we are to each other, unless it is the natural outcome of mutual respect and liking, the aftertaste of insincerity and artificiality, like the proverbial fly in the ointment, never goes away. It continues to spoil the pleasure of social intercourse, and eventually, triggered often by some wholly insignificant remark, will explode in anger caused by the pent-up frustration over having to pretend for too long to feel what one really doesn't. And such an inevitable explosion is the best proof of the fundamental falsity of such a mode of human interaction, no matter how widely acceptable and almost universally approved it is. 1000. The common notion and standard definition to the contrary, the personal authenticity seldom come naturally and therefore effortlessly, with the possible exception, perhaps, in the very early childhood, though even then whatever "natural" there is in a child is being gradually beaten and punished physically and psychologically out of . Latter on, while growing up, which in a social sense actually means being continuously moulded and shaped by "carrots and sticks" in order to conform to the mode of behaviour acceptable to this or that particular society, the older one gets the more difficult it is to remain true to oneself. Consequently, to maintain personal authenticity requires daily struggle whose victories are few and far in between, and then mostly of the Pyrrhic kind. For like many other highly praised human virtues, the authenticity is as universally admired as it is commonly persecuted. 1001. I think it is quite natural for the parents, who had traded in their own dreams for the "daily bread", to expect the children to do the same. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are deeply resentful and hurt when their children refuse to do so. For such parents tend to interpret, rightly or wrongly, the unwillingness on the part of a child to follow the suit as the condemnation of the kind of choices they themselves had made, and this can eventually lead to the terrible realization, suppressed and denied for a long time, that after all one's life was not a success, not even the modest and mediocre one, but the abysmal and even tragic failure. Which can help to explain why so often the mid-life crisis of a parent coincides with the youthful rebellion of a child. For at the end of the day our children are our ultimate justification. But not all parents draw the same conclusions from the similar life experiences of trade-offs and compromises. Some will do just the opposite, i.e. they would do their best to help the children to avoid the bitterness of making the same sacrifices they had made, sometimes going so far as to impose their own unfulfilled dreams or the variations thereof on a child who doesn't yet have any of its own. For lets face it, there are a lot of children out there who don't know what they want to do with their lives. And finally, in either case the inter-generational harmony would depend, as always, on whether the children do what their parents think is the best for them which as we just saw is highly subjective. 1002. The price of being born includes, among the other things, having to cope with the ways one's parents treat each other, which in the average family means trying to survive with the least amount of wounds and scars as possible the permanent state of spousal war, in which a child is often used as a weapon besides being both a witness and the inevitable casualty. 1003. While the polyphony of being carries within the joy and sorrow, the ecstasy and despair of life, it is in a single tone of silence that we seek the truth and the meaning of it all. 1004. Acknowledging as self-evident that Man is the social animal and as such cannot survive, let alone prosper in isolation, but has to belong to some community to do so, the real and perhaps the most important question one has to find the answer to is: what each of us, being a part of this community, owns to its other members? What are one's social and personal obligations as a son or a daughter, as a friend, as a spouse, as a parent, as a co-worker, as a citizen , etc. ? And is it possible to answer all these questions without knowing what one owns to oneself? Or, in other words, where do the social obligations stop and personal begin, or vice versa? |
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