2024.01.04
To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it, a drastic limiting of horizons.
What has a price can be replaced with something else, as its equivalent; whereas, what is elevated above any price, and hence allows of no equivalent, has a dignity.
I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing.I was really struck by this as a strong contrast to the more commonly expressed frustration with mortality - so often the emphasis is on books, places, knowledge, music, paintings, culture we WON'T encounter within our lifepan, but I think this points out we can also mourn the loss of what were externalities that we have made out of ourselves.
[Every] profound political protest is an appeal to a justice that is absent, and is accompanied by a hope that in the future this justice will be established; this hope, however, is not the *first* reason the protest is being made. One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests (by building a barricade, taking up arms, going on a hunger strike, linking arms, shouting, writing) in order to *save the present moment*, whatever the future holds. . . . A protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative, more just future; it is an inconsequential redemption of the present. The problem is how to live time and again with the adjective *inconsequential*.I appreciate this point - with all the activism I support through music, there are some positive results but a lot of futility.
I was tempted to snip out the "inconsequential" bit. Because I think redemption of the present is a consequence, but that word might sour any note of reassurance for a non-careful reader.