The Birth And Death of Meaning
Quotes
If we could become comfortable with this knowledge and make it the general property of large masses of voters and their political representatives there is no doubt that we would probably become one of the wisest planets in the universe—at least of our form of life, and we would deserve our species title Homo sapiens, Man the Wise.
“Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.”
We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self
because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a
great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away,
of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them.
One of life’s most shattering and self-revealing experiences is to have divulged to oneself the unconscious sources of his power: mother, the boss, money, the Pentagon, the heroes of the free-enterprise system, Marx and Lenin, Humanity, the Church, one’s spouse, his Guru, or his guns.
“All through history man has searched for ultimate reality by various means, mystical and intuitive, rational and scientific. Today, some thousands of years after the launching of this search we have had to throw up our hands with Einstein and modern philosophy, and declare that all is relative to our perceptual equipment and to our transcended place.”
Imagine it, man has already landed on the moon and has yet to place a shrine or leave an offering there, but has already littered it with national flags
As the great Carlyle warned us, everybody has to think and see for himself, or the nations are doomed.
In the social world one continually pushes against death in sport-car driving, mountain climbing, stock speculation, gambling: but always in a more-or-less controlled way, so as not to give in completely to the sheer accidentality and callousness of life, but to savor the thrill of skirting it. Probably at its most creative this dialogue with one’s basic anxieties lies in art, science, and discovery, where one pushes, in a controlled way, into the realm of the wondrous, the mysterious; the scientist unveils this world in small doses, ever just not quite risking the overwhelming
If I were to write a manual on seduction for adolescent young men, the first and foremost precept would be: Keep your mouth shut. But silence is not a facile talent for everybody: many people feel they have to talk in order to keep the interaction moving, and in order to discover and validate their identity. For them, silence is constricting and undermining.