Holiday blear
One too many little frosted sugar cookies, mayhap? Sucrose poisoning? Running cleared it out.
My mother's tailbone seems to have finally healed, and we'll hope there are no more ice skating on tile floors kinds of incidents. The holidays appear to cause befuddlement for her, perhaps from mingling and confused memories; her generation is also typically tight-lipped regarding their own personal emotions, although not always about others' perceived short-comings and errors. Fortunately she's never been abusive in that latter regard.
Toothsome bit from Iris Murdoch's 1973 novel, The Black Prince:
"The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagra-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently' because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word 'good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery,but by what is grandly called 'duty' and more accurately 'habit.' Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage."
My mother's tailbone seems to have finally healed, and we'll hope there are no more ice skating on tile floors kinds of incidents. The holidays appear to cause befuddlement for her, perhaps from mingling and confused memories; her generation is also typically tight-lipped regarding their own personal emotions, although not always about others' perceived short-comings and errors. Fortunately she's never been abusive in that latter regard.
Toothsome bit from Iris Murdoch's 1973 novel, The Black Prince:
"The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagra-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently' because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word 'good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery,but by what is grandly called 'duty' and more accurately 'habit.' Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage."
posted by isabelita at 1:53 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home