The danger of wisdom
Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)
We learn to live without passion.
To be reasonable. We go hungry
amid the giant granaries
this world is. We store up plenty
for when we are old and mild.
It is our strength that deprives us.
Like Keats listening to the doctor
who said the best thing for
tuberculosis was to eat only one
slice of bread and a fragment
of fish each day. Keats starved
himself to death because he yearned
so desperately to feast on Fanny Brawne.
Emerson and his wife decided to make
love sparingly in order to accumulate
his passion. We are taught to be
moderate. To live intelligently.
“The heart lies to itself because it must.”
stoicism
Stoicism, then, is essentially unphilosophic. It simplifies human troubles by ignoring half of them. It is a wilful blindness, a constant begging of the question. It fosters apathy and paralyzes the sensibilities. It is through our sensibilities that we suffer, but it is through them, too, that we enjoy ; and when, by a practical annihilation of the body, the soul is rendered inaccessible to pain, it is likewise rendered both inaccessible and incompetent to real pleasure, – to the pleasure of action ; for the source of half its impressions, the medium of its constant expression, the condition of human reciprocity, has been destroyed.
Bruce Chatwin
“Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.” – Bruce Chatwin, What Am I doing here?