Month: November 2001

A foolish, passionate man


I have little doubt that I have, indeed, been a foolish man many times in my lifetime. Of course, like most people, I preferred to be known as a wise man. In fact, if anything, most of my life, like far too many of my ex-students, I prided myself a little too much on just how bright a student I was, as if somehow life and school were the same.

Once I read Isaac Singer’s remarkable "Gimpel the Fool," though, I never worried about being called a fool again. If only I could be as foolish as Gimpel.

Briefly, Gimpel spent his early life as the town fool, the butt of everyone’s jokes. Then he was pressured into marrying a woman of questionable virtue. When their child is born “prematurely” he, like most of us would, confronts his wife who berates him and tells him that it is certainly his child. Though unconvinced, his love for the child, perhaps the first true love he has ever known, takes over. He says, “I began to forget my sorrow. I loved the child madly, and he loved me too. As soon as he saw me he’d wave his little hands and want me to pick him up, and when he was colicky I was the only one who could pacify him.” Unfortunately, judging from the popular media, too few people are able to get past a wife’s sins to the child’s love. Hate, not love, controls their life.

Later Gimpel leaves his wife because of her adultery, but he is inevitably drawn back to her. “A longing took me, for her and for the child. I wanted to be angry, but that’s my misfortune exactly, I don’t have it in me to be really angry. In the first place-this was how my thoughts went-there’s bound to be a slip sometimes. You can’t live without errors.” Oh, duh. It’s just a lot easier to see other people’s errors.

Early in the story when Gimpel goes to the rabbi for advice the rabbi says, “It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.” This sounds like perfect advice until the Rabbi’s daughter tries to trick him in the way out of the temple.

It’s little wonder that love loses out so often in a world where people are taught that there are right and wrong answers to life, where you are down-graded for being wrong, and where you are considered gullible if you trust others too much.

We should all be fools for love, especially if it is love for our fellow man. If we can’t manage to love everyone, at least it’s easy to be foolishly and passionately in love with the children of our world.

A Prayer for Old Age

A PRAYER FOR OLD AGE

GOD guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
0 what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?

I pray-for fashion’s word is out
And prayer comes round again
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats

Here’s another Yeats’ poem that I didn’t really appreciate until recently, perhaps because old age didn’t seem too relevant until now. I suspect, though, that what Yeats seeks in all of his poems are eternal values that can guide our entire life.

Although it is common for Romantic poets to emphasize intuition over logic, to emphasize heart over mind, there does seem to be a certain irony in a man who has devoted his life to letters condemning men whose thoughts are ‘in the mind alone."

I suspect, though, that this is an ambivalence that haunts many of us who enjoy studying ideas and reading literature. Too often literature seems a form of escape rather than a solution to lifeâs problems. Itâs easier to read a romantic novel than it is to build real love in your life. Itâs certainly easier to analyze politics than it is to effect real change in our society. No matter how many environmental books you read, the environment continues to degrade.

As a literature teacher, I was often accused of promoting this. Many students found literature irrelevant, and it was extremely difficult to show them the relevance if they didn’t already see it. Despite my occasional sarcastic remarks that I would hate to marry a person who couldnât even understand the motivation for a character in a novel, too often I felt unable to show students how these ideas were relevant to their lives.

Nor am I denying that reading for escapism isn’t sometimes necessary. My best friend sent me a copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to read while I was stationed in Vietnam. Although this later became one of my favorite 20th century novels, I could barely get through two chapters. Instead, I repeatedly read passages from the Rubiat of Omar Khayyam, a work I haven’t read since.

Still, I would argue that the major goal of reading and thinking should be to empower your life, not avoid it. Reading and thinking should enrich your life, make you happier, and give you the understanding you need to cope with an increasingly complex world. They should unite you with your world, not alienate you from it.

Most of all, though, they should create a passion for life that, no matter how foolish it may appear to others, provides meaning to your life.

Politics

‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in
political terms!–THOMAS MANN
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But 0 that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats

After a week spent living in the moment and trying to keep the little guy laughing, not crying, I’m finding it difficult to suddenly switch back to "reality."

Thus, I was happy to find links to Pretty Faces Get Men’s Brains Going: Study at wood s lot

Simply put, if you have to start thinking again, it’s much easier to start thinking about girls than it is to think about Afghanistan, the Florida ballot, or, particularly, the airplane crash in New York that greeted me when I re-encountered the "real world" by turning on the television this morning.

A week taking care of a one-year-old didn’t actually make me think about girls, but it did make me think about what it means to be young again.

And for a short while, I could recapture the wonder of seeing things in a new light when we spent fifteen minutes walking ten feet while picking up and discarding fallen leaves in order to find the "perfect" leaf, perfect, at least, until we decided to drop it ten minutes later because we wanted "up." Nothing’s too precious to let go of in a new moment.

What a wonder this world is when you can see it in new ways, whether itâs from the top of a slide sitting next to a child who finds the descent to earth terrifying, even if it is only five feet away, or from a swing, where the world seems in constant motion.

Up close and personal, the world is a miraculous place if we allow it to be.

I’m Out of Here for Five Days

I’m taking off for five days of taking care of my nearly two year old grandson. When I did this last year, it turned out to be a hightlight for the year. So, I’m really looking forward to the next five days.

If it turns out like last year, though, I doubt that I will have much time to access a computer, much less spend time reading or contemplating what I might have to say.

That’s okay, living in the moment is where it really it is at, at least for five days