Yesterday, someone clicked on the September 16, 2004 post below. When I began the present post I remembered when I went to shorten the former for present purposes how difficult it always was for me to excerpt Remembrance of Things Past. Every word, 3,000 pages of them, always seemed to me unextractable. I did manage to shorten it a bit but it is still long so I have bolded in addition.
The Remembrance post called to mind other posts on similar themes, principal here, what is means to truly have lived. Not survived, the soul of China, but to have lived. I feel that theme these days, I have written about it. I do not feel I have truly lived the present and would have risked so worthless a life in the present pandemic. That is the reason I quoted Charles Darnay's death in A Tale of Two Cities; that was the proximate impetus for the selfie video; it is the reason I have taken adderall the past twenty years, and so on. I therefore have included in this post others on the same theme.
Man is the sum
Of the living he’s done
And the choices he’s made in his time.
...
Oh the wisdom is reaching
Far beyond what you see
And the triumph is seeking
All the best you can be.
So delight in the journey
Or the struggle it seems
To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might...
...All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate.
...
I think that as life is action and passion it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
" 'there is no man,' he began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. and yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. i know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. they may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives;...but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. we do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us...the lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. they represent a struggle and a victory...the picture of what we were at an earlier stage...cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. but we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that...we have, from the common elements of life,...extracted something that transcends them.' "
-marcel proust, "remembrance of things past."
" 'there is no man,' he began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. and yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. i know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. they may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives;...but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. we do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us...the lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. they represent a struggle and a victory...the picture of what we were at an earlier stage...cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. but we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that...we have, from the common elements of life,...extracted something that transcends them.' "
-marcel proust, "remembrance of things past."
-marcel proust, "remembrance of things past."
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Of the living he’s done
And the choices he’s made in his time.
...
Oh the wisdom is reaching
Far beyond what you see
And the triumph is seeking
All the best you can be.
So delight in the journey
Or the struggle it seems
Monday, May 26, 2008
Memorial Day [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1884)]
...All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate.
...
I think that as life is action and passion it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
