Better

History has proven that it is difficult for me to organize thoughts late at night and that, inevitably, something I wanted to say will be forgotten simply because of the hour but, despite that, here is an attempt to get a few scattered thoughts from the past weeks down. It is Christmas again and, in thinking about the Incarnation, I was reminded of Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity."
I did my Christmas shopping today. It involved a trip to the Hallmark store, where I bought several cards. Every time I shop for a greeting card, I look for a card that's blank inside, allowing me to write exactly what I want to say. I find that cards with pre-printed messages inside ring cliched and insincere. In the worst cases, I am convinced that their carefully worded messages are outright lies. "You were always there for me," "You always encouraged me," "You always...." I can't bring myself to sign my name to a card containing a message for someone that, were I to say it to their face, would be a bald lie. Maybe I'm too cynical and am making too much of this. After all, nobody's perfect.... Right?
Malcolm Gladwell has done it again. He's written a book that will probably do very well and make him lots of money, provided that not too many people read David Brooks' recent review of said monograph. Who really wants to hear that he or she is no more than a victim of circumstances, a product of his or her upbringing and surroundings, whose fate and opportunities throughout life are defined solely by forces completely beyond his or her control?? I don't want to read something like that! I would much rather be encouraged by someone who tells me that I have the ability to fly in the face of both fate and my circumstances in order to create a life of my own as I should like it to be, instead of being threatened with some bleak, deterministic outlook. Bah!
"The purpose of art is to unify through communicating." -Me. I thought this one up while sitting through a concert about 3 weeks ago. It seems to me a decent definition of the purpose of art, which might also provide a criterion for separating "art" from non-art. If a supposed piece of art is so subjective in its orientation that it communicates a completely different "meaning" to each individual observer, then it is not unifying people through a shared meaning or interpretation and cannot truly be called "art."
Two weeks ago, I had to show the attack scenes from the movie Pearl Harbor to a history class I was substitute teaching. I found one part of the movie during this sequence particularly touching. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are about to take to the sky in planes and attempt to fight back against the Jap attack. Affleck is ready to go, but his friend Josh needs some encouragement. Turning to Josh, Affleck tells him he'd better start his plane: "You know I'm not much good without a wingman!" It made me think of David and Jonathan. Good, tight friendships like that are a big deal. And nobody is much good without a wingman. Ahhh. The whole movie seems to divide really neatly along gender roles. The guys have a battle to fight and the women fix them up as they do. There may be a really solid counter-example blowing this conclusion out of the water, but I can't think of it.
Today I was pondering possible answers to the common question, "How are you?" One not uncommon reply is "I could be better." I realized today that I am doing better than ever, that I am better than I've ever been and, furthermore, there is a strong possibility that life is going to continue to get even BETTER in the course of the next year.

On Final Realities

"'Son,' he said, 'ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless, he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. NOt only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' no knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me but have this and I'll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.' And both will speak truly.'" -Lewis, The Great Divorce, 67-8.

"Human beings can't make one another really happy for long." -91.

Somebody Else's Musings

"Now it is a city hospital on a Monday morning. This is the obstetrical ward. The doctors and nurses wear scrubs of red, blue, or green, and white running shoes. They are, according to the tags clipped to their pockets, obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, pediatric nurse practitioners, and pediatric RNs. They consult one another on the hoof. They carry clipboards and vanish down corridors. They push numbered buttons on wall plaques, and doors open.
There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out." -For the Time Being, Annie Dillard, 36.

"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself -- in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love -- and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it." -FtTB, 47.

"'All that is really worthwhile is action,' Teilhard wrote. 'Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.'" -FtTB, 105. (Really, Chardin?)