This is the first in the series Tremendous Trifles. I’ve read 8/39 so far. I just read ”The Advantages of Having One Leg” during dinner tonight and had a good laugh. A strange sort of laugh filled with nuggets of jolly and goodness that I can always get from GK. I was going to post that one, but this one was equally great, and the first of them all so I figured I’ll just post it in it’s entirety for you when you have 5 minutes [...]
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I love questions like this. And I also love radiolab because they ask questions like this.
Jad: “How has this little event changed you?”
Liza: “Well I’m still working with those mice… and now when I go into that room with that little lazer, I just really empathise with them…. yeah I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”
You’d have to listen to that episode to understand that last part. Not a particularly amazing episode… just enjoyed that snippet.
Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. - Philippe Petit
I find it intriguing that people have to come to their own realizations sometimes to be able to see things. I can be told something profound, but unless it hits me, I won't be able to apply it or truly see the meaning of it.
This is from a Radiolab episode titled "Morality."
There's a mother who comes in to drop her son off at school and arrives early. The teacher invites her into this closet where she could watch her son from a hidden glass window where the kids couldn't see them. She was watching them and suddenly saw her son tackle his best friend. Everyone gathered around. The kid was laying on the ground and when he got up he had a bloody lip. "He was mortified and scared by his own actions," the mother said. At that moment she says she regretted not having gone in and doing anything. But her sister said, "the best thing you did was stay out of it."
"Jack had to see the consequences of his own actions on his own terms."
I tend to expect a lot I suppose. Or want a lot. I want better. I want to know more. And sometimes this leaves you dissatisfied with the simple. The last year or so I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot. Discontentedness that comes from lack of this idealized reality that we build up for ourselves. (Oh this reminds me of this podcast – look for the one called “Hyper reality” if you’re interested). Anyways here is a quote from GK. I love him for stuff like this. Soo good. And it makes me laugh.
The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle.
That Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted
head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of empires
and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he sees
things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he did
if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet.
“What are those two beautiful and industrious beings,” I can imagine him
murmuring to himself, “whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why?
What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I
was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs,
must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?”
The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain
mystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said,
“Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,”
put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth “Blessed
is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.”
The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see,
and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that
expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains;
blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we
realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light
as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness,
all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine.
Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God,
and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war.
It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing
until we know nothing.
- GK Chesterton
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them. I originally said that a cockney lamp-post painted pea-green was better than no light or no life; and that if it was a lonely lamp-post, we might really see its light better against the background of the dark....
In short, as it seems to me, it matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress, if his discontent does in fact paralyse his power of appreciating what he has got. The real difficulty of man is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment. To keep the capacity of really liking what he likes;
"There's no such thing as not enough time if you're doing what you want to do."—Robert Half
But maturity in prayer—and in theology—means working more and more from prayers of request (complaint or petition), through prayers of gratitude (thanksgiving or praise), and on to prayers of empowerment (participation or collaboration)—with a God who is absolutely transcendent and immanent at the same time. That God is like the air all around us. God, like air, is everywhere, for everyone, always, and both totally free as well as absolutely necessary. (pg. 28)
After all, although God often speaks of rejecting prayer in the absence of justice, God never speaks of rejecting justice in the absence of prayer. (p. 20)
Instead, they [the prophets] insist that God does not want prayer, ritual, liturgy, or sacrifice, but wants instead that righteous justice rule not only the land of Israel, but all the earth. (p. 14)
I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind.
...Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar WIlde.
...It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.- GK Chesterton / Orthodoxy