At the entrance to the university there was an inscription dedicating the campus to the memory of Leland Stanford, Jr., “born to mortality . . . passed to immortality,” a mother’s undying love metamorphosed into an institution of timber beam, plaster walls, reinforced concrete, and carved stone. So we convert our tragedies into objects that will withstand corrosive rain, seismic upheavals, and time. We place memorial urns in the cloisters, a chapel at the heart of it all, columns and commemorative plaques that lift our eyes from the ground. Even our intellectual labor aspires to the condition of permanence and transcendence, though our lives are transitory in comparison, our miseries commonplace, our labors unavailing. I felt a strong desire to testify to the struggle of those who lacked the means to pretend that life was otherwise. In about an hour I would present a paper about the life of a Kuranko woman for whom this place might well appear to be paradise, but ...
Image: Cactus Man, Odilon Redon - 1881 » How horrible boredom is – how horribly boring. I know no stronger expression, none truer, for only like knows like. If only there were a higher expression, a stronger one, then at least there would still be another movement. I lie stretched out, inert; all I see is emptiness, all I live on is emptiness, all I move in is emptiness. I don’t even suffer pain. At least the vulture kept pecking at Pr ometheus’s liver; at least the poison kept dropping on Loki; there were interruptions, however monotonous. Even pain has lost its power to refresh me. If I were offered all the world’s glories or all its torments, I’d be equally indifferent, I wouldn’t turn over either to reach for them or escape from them. I die death itself. What could possibly divert me? If I saw a loyalty that outlasted every trial, an enthusiasm that bore everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I sensed a thought that bound together the finite and the infinite. But my soul’s po...
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