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#28 — Chance and Good

Saturday 16 March 2013

Beauty is the harmony of chance and the good.

The element of chance in our lives would probably overwhelm us if we knew its extent. A decision not to go with a newly-founded school’s students on a field trip to the Baltic might lead to a chance invitation to a bar where one meets a new friend. A chance meeting of one’s student with the friend’s neighbor might get you both invited to an eventual wedding, where one suddenly discovers that the friend is really someone more wonderful than one imagined.

And from that string of chance — or is it more? — comes good. And so beauty.

A chance walk on an uncommonly warm February day might lead to a meeting that leads to a dear friend.

#27 — Monotony of Evil

Friday 15 March 2013

Monotony comes in many forms.

Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary.

It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Celimene), etc. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

This is becoming one of those forms.

#26 — Eternity

Thursday 14 March 2013

Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

How can utter fragility provide a sense of eternity? I’ve sat and thought about that for a while, and it seems one of those things that I understand intuitively but am unable to put into words. The fact that it could pass out of existence at any moment fixes it firmly to that moment, but eternity doesn’t seem to be about moments — it appears to be the opposite, in fact. Yet the usual way of thinking of eternity is to imagine it as infinite moments, one after another, in a never-beginning, never-ending line. Indeed, a line in the strictest geometrical definition. That’s the paradox of eternity: it’s every moment in a never-ending moment.

It is a succession of spring blossoms under an unchanging blanket of constellations.

#24 — Time and Incarnation

Tuesday 12 March 2013

There is always a relationship with time to be taken into account. We must get rid of the illusion of possessing time. We must become incarnate.

The desire to possess time and the realization that it’s an utter impossibility is one of the marks of the transition to adulthood we all go through. It was a troubling time for me, as it is for most, because it means, on some level, the relinquishing of the idea of eternal youth. Perhaps that’s what the acceptance of one’s on mortality is about in some way.

It’s just this desire to possess time that Adam Duritz sings about in “A Long December,” a song that haunted me as I thought about things past that would never return.

And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass

We can’t hold on to these or any other moments, and the continual effort to do so would only be a sign that we’re not maturing, emotionally or spiritually.

#23 — Creation

Monday 11 March 2013

Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil.

Some days, I hate my job. That’s nothing new, I guess, but some days, working with over a hundred eighth-graders and dealing with all their hormone-driven nonsense, feeling that the evil — for lack of a better term, though it is hyperbolic — vastly outweighs the good, pondering whether teaching is not “good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil,” I want to stand up and say something like this:

I don’t care. I don’t care who called you a name. I don’t care who’s tapping a pencil and bothering you. I don’t care if you left your pencil in your last class. I don’t care if you didn’t have a pencil to begin with. I don’t care if you think last night’s baseball game was great. I don’t care if you’ve lost your book. I don’t care if you like someone. I don’t care if someone teased you about your haircut. I don’t care if you forgot to do your homework. I don’t care if you left your book at home. I don’t care if you don’t like someone. I don’t care if someone beside you passed gas. I don’t care who’s spreading rumors about you. I don’t care if the person seated behind you is tapping your desk with her foot. I don’t care if someone told you shut up. I don’t care if you’ll forget what you were going to say if you don’t say it now, to someone seated on the other side of the room. I don’t care if someone made a comment about your shoes. I don’t care if someone threatened to pour milk on your head. I don’t care if you wanted to talk to him. I don’t care if you don’t want to work with him or with her. I don’t care if someone made a joke about your grades. I don’t care if you needed some attention and so continually cut up in class. I don’t care if someone threw your book in the garbage on the way out. I don’t care about any of your childish, kindergarten problems.

All of these statements have been true. Sometimes many of them have been true at the same moment; at other times, only a handful. Usually, the moment passes and I remember that I do care. Of course, some of these things are so trivial that my concern matches their triviality, but I think you’re still too young to understand that fully. Still, the moment most of them become true most of the time or, heaven forbid, all of them are true all of the time will be the moment I realize I must leave teaching.

I thought for a moment this afternoon that that was the case.

#21 — Filling and Creating Emptiness

Friday 8 March 2013

To harm a person is to receive something from him. […] We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness by creating one in somebody else (50).

Perhaps the best example of filling an emptiness by creating one in another is bullying. Working at a middle school, I’m witness to many major and minor instances of bullying on a daily basis, and it seems to be getting only worse. Statisticians tell us that’s definitely the case, but even if they weren’t providing empirical evidence, I get enough anecdotal evidence daily to make a strong case.

As a teacher, I find I have to walk a thin line. On the one hand, we’ve seen the headlines of recent years, this or that tragic suicide traced back to prolonged bullying, actions that have created situations in which some people feel suicide is the only alternative. Bullying, then, is literally a deadly serious, and as the authority figure in the room or hallways, I have a responsibility to put an end to it when I encounter it. Yet most bullying today is not like the bullying I occasionally encountered. Today’s bullying, ban and large, is verbal. Indeed, there is a whole category of bullying that could be only mental: cyber bullying. In other words, a lot of bullying is of the type “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Yet the truth is, words do hurt. Still, we need resilient, self-assured kids who can take care of themselves and who know how to avoid internalizing the stupid little comments they hear and will hear, in one form or another, throughout life, so I don’t want to help kids become dependent on me — or anyone else — to swoop in and save the day every single time says something mean and bullying.

And so when I do encounter something that I judge to be relatively minor but still behavior that could be considered “bullying,” I try to strike a balance. I deal with the individual who said the hateful words, but I spend more time talking to the person to whom he or she directed the words. (That was a long way to get around saying “victim.” It was a conscious choice.) I tell her that there are individuals who only feel good about themselves when making others feel bad. To quote Weil, these individuals have “gained in importance,” but only in their own mind.

#19 — Refusal

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Weil writes,

God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales of initiation. If I accept this gift, it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.

It’s not something I pretend to understand. Even with a conversion to Catholicism and resulting reading and studying, the whole reason for a deity to create anything confuses me. If God is perfect, why create anything? What does that provide a perfect being that said being doesn’t already possess?

#18 — Future Pleasure

Tuesday 5 March 2013

2012 Calendar

When we are disappointed by a pleasure which we have been expecting and which comes, the disappointment is because we were expecting the future. And as soon as it is there, it is the present. We want the future to be there without ceasing to be the future. This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure (66).

As a kid, I used to look forward to the autumn with almost visible excitement. Every fall, we headed off for the closest thing to a vacation we ever had: a week-long religious festival that included enough relatively free time to make it feel like vacation. It meant missing school, which made it all the better, and given the fact that we saved all year for the one week, the relative affluence I experienced made it seem like Christmas every day. Yet every year, a strange melancholy overtook me ever so briefly at the beginning: it had finally arrived, and while I was thrilled about that, I also knew that I had nothing else to look forward to afterward.

Yet I think Weil is talking about more than the mere excitement of being in a metaphorical candy store. Underneath this longing for the future, this “absurdity which eternity alone is the cure,” is a very serious attempt to sketch out what some have described as a hint of the beyond, or as Peter Berger might have called it, a rumor of angels. That sense of never being fulfilled is a hint, Catholic writer Peter Kreeft argues, that there is something more to fulfill it.

Photo by danmoyle

#17 — Evil and Duty

Monday 4 March 2013

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

He stood in the hallway, thinking I don’t really know what. Was he not aware that I’d heard the profanity coming from his mouth? Was he not aware that the profanity, misogynistic and vile. had indeed come from him mouth? Was he bluffing, hoping for some — what?

If I had asked him what possessed him to say those things, to call the female student a b—-, to become enraged, he would probably (indeed, likely, even predictably) justify it.

“She started it.”

“Did you see what she did to me?”

“Nobody’s going to do that to me and get away with it.”

A thousand and one excuses. A million and one reasons why the evil was not evil, but a necessity. A duty.

#16 — Imagination and Fiction

Saturday 2 March 2013

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. Rare indeed are the true contacts with good and evil.

Weil’s words read like a quote out of The Matrix or Inception, and it’s easy to brush them off as metaphorical theorizing:

And it’s easy to pass it onto the “madding crowd” and insist that we ourselves are not imagining things, not asleep. We are fully aware of the reality around us and can separate it from wish and fantasy, but the materialistic hordes around us can’t. It’s easy to think that way.

VIV_8847
Afternoon at Bounce House

Surely, with rarefied reality all around us — the screams of delight of children at play, the hard crack of a helmet against plexiglass, a blast of cold air when we get out of the car — we are awake.

VIV_9005
A visit to the ice next to the Bounce House

Of course Weil doesn’t mean anything so cinematic. She’s simply pointing out our uncanny ability to deceive ourselves and fall for the farce completely, to create worlds out of our irrational fears and project them on everyone and everything, to believe that the way we see the world is the way everyone sees it and indeed the only true way to perceive it. I see the effects of this every day at school: some students have mastered already the art of fully deceiving themselves, convinced that they can do no wrong and that all the trouble they find themselves in can easily be laid at the doorstep of others (read: adults; read: teachers).

I’m not sure what the kick (to borrow a term from Inception) for this dream might be, especially when we’re not even sure we can kick ourselves awake. Perhaps awareness is the first and, paradoxically, last step. An afternoon spent with the Girl at a birthday party followed by a bit of first-time exposure to live hockey should be enough to separate fiction from good, imagination from evil.

That’s the secular answer.

I think Weil might not entirely agree, though. Like Inception, we need someone who doesn’t share that same reality, someone who’s at a level higher (literally in the film and in Catholicism too, I suppose) to help jar us out of the fictions we create for ourselves.