My meditation for today: What is it that bedevils us? What is the bad advice that has sent us out into this desert, so far from what we must search for only inwardly? I say, the thought, nay, the whisper in our ear that capital is the guarantor of happiness, or that obedience to it is its guarantee. That consumption is the culmination of our humanity. That excess is our motto. This concept defines the Good of our time and, moreover, it is subliminal. We know not that it is there. It operates just under the threshold of consciousness. We cultivate it as he who prepares the soil for a flower has done so also for a weed. That is why, as an invasive parasite, it has survived, nay, flourished to the quiet satisfaction of those who have planted it. They grin at our struggle for meaning, at our lives of quiet desperation. But the gospel, the good news, is that for posterity it is still floating in the wind and can be carried away as quickly as it came along. And if it has landed, and grown in us, and thrived as a thorny bramble, it can still be pulled out by the root, though it may prick our hands. The aggressive acquisition of material wealth does not, and cannot, bring any real, enduring personal fulfillment. This is my promise to you. The pursuit thereof, as the modus operandi of civil life, is an error. We have devoured the world, yet what we seek lies not entirely in the earth but also in our minds and in our hearts. We must know it as much as feel it. What is it that is truly good for us? Love, a healthy body, and a sound mind are altogether the one and only source of true happiness. This is not to say that we do not depend for our lives on the earth, on the water and dust as the source from which we sprang. That would be a transgression against our mundane descent. Instead, it is a statement that emphasizes the importance of the metaphysical dimension of our inner lives (that part of our being that is cultivated not so much by the fruits of the earth as by its own activity), their happy concourse with each other (Love), and the quality of the vessel as a precondition for magnanimity, or greatness of heart and mind. And I say that these should be the sole pursuit of this one life we each have been given by those who came before us. A passage on disillusionment that inspired these thoughts: From the Introduction, written by Jeremy Robbins, Forbes Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, to The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence (Baltasar Gracian), Penguin, 2011, pp 31-2: Gracian posits a world of deception and illusion, in which appearances predominate and malice and cunning are omnipresent. Hence the distrust, pessimism and misanthropy that characterize his world-view. The key concept here is deceit (engano): this covers, for Gracian, not simply the deception of one individual by another, but our self-deception as to the true nature and value of the world, and hence our deception by the world. It is a term at once moral and epistemological: to fail to know the world for what it is condemns us to moral error and to failure. Because of our tendency to accept appearances and to follow our desires, passions and emotions, we are mired in a world of deceit. There is consequently an urgent need for disillusionment (disengano), the other key concept of the Spanish Baroque. For Gracian and his contemporaries, disillusionment means the realization of the true worth of things, seeing them as they really are: in essence, that this world and all within it is worthless. For many writers, this means explicitly viewing things not from a human or worldly perspective, but from the perspective of eternity, on the grounds that the here-and-now, being transient, amounts to mere appearance, true reality being what awaits us after death. This overtly religious or metaphysical dimension is less emphasized by Gracian, though it is by no means absent from his work. For him, the world is viewed as nothing but illusion, not simply because it is transitory, but because deceit is omnipresent. There is, then, a constant tension between appearance and reality. Most people settle for the former, but the prudent only for the latter, for they realize that reality (both the here-and-now and heaven) can be lost in pursuit of an illusion. This is why disillusion is said to nourish prudence [as in aphorism no. 100]. An absolutely central message of the work, therefore, is the need endlessly to scrutinize and probe beneath appearances.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 23:26:05 +0000
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