At some point in every man’s life, he must declare the road he wishes to follow. This statement may be openly verbal, or it may be spoken indirectly, through actions and deeds. It does not matter how the statement is made: the point is that it is made, whether the man is aware of it or not. There exists a need in every human heart to declare itself to the outside world, and this need cannot indefinitely be suppressed. It must find a voice.
Anyone who has ever cleaned out his basement or attic has certainly come across writings or photos from earlier years. We are likely to wince upon reading things we wrote ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago, to the same degree that we shake our heads in bewilderment at seeing old photos of ourselves. This is because our minds, and our consciousness, does not remain fixed and unmoved as we age; they are not like the Rock of Gibraltar. The things we believe when we were younger are not going to be the same things we believe as we get older. This is natural and predictable; only a fool would refuse to change his views as he aggregates years and worldly experience.
We are unlikely to arrive at any awareness of things while sitting within the confines of our domestic barricades. Enlightenment requires perception; perception, sensory input; and sensory input, direct experience with the world of the living outside our familiar habitations. The leisure of contemplation, and the enticements of philosophical reflection, allow for the refinement and processing of these experiences, but cannot serve as a direct substitute for them; and unlucky is he who deludes himself into believing he has arrived at weighty insights from the contemplation of the four walls around him.
From birth we are surrounded by the inherited and imposed belief systems of our environment. Such systems exert a silent force on our thinking; they channel our behaviors within defined limits, and demarcate the boundaries of conventional thought. They can become so pervasive that they escape even our own notice. We should not necessarily see this as an evil, for custom and tradition provide, on balance, a certain predictability and stability that makes for civilized leisure and artistic creation; and society must have some immovable foundation upon which to direct its spires skyward.
There are some who say that idle talk has no purpose, and should be avoided. Yet in many cases it serves valuable purposes: it enables us to test ideas or plans on our friends, and solicit their opinions; it enables us to relieve stress; and it enables us to pass the time in conversational pleasantry. Not every dialogue needs to have a definite purpose; sometimes the exchange of words themselves becomes a form of relaxation. The exchange below is taken verbatim from James Boswell’s famous Life of Samuel Johnson. In the short dialogue between himself and his biographer, Johnson, that great man of English letters, makes the point that it may be well to make idle speech, as long as one does not unduly subscribe to its banalities.
When a man is under the duress of extreme events, he sometimes finds himself wracked by indecision. He will mull over various courses of action in his head; he will script out different scenarios in his imagination; and he will ponder his predicament from multiple perspectives. And yet, when he has finished with these troublesome cogitations, he may find a course of action still eludes him; but at some point, a moment of inspiration will arrive to pierce the gloom, and confer on him the guidance he has desperately been seeking. When this happens, he must unhesitatingly seize the present hour for action, and proceed with his rendezvous with Fate.
I have spent the past two days in Athens seeking out some of the monuments of classic Greek art. I have tried to see as many works of art and architecture as was reasonably possible, and thought I would here provide the impressions gained from these observations.
