21 February 2006
The Literary Wino at 15,000 feet
Note: originally typed stream of consciousness on 1/27. Recently rediscovered on my laptop.
Friday, January 27, 2006 at 3:26pm Central, from Seat 12A, Northwest flight 2973, somewhere between Detroit and Lincoln.
I’m sitting in the very back of the small plane, next to the lavatory, a place one never wants to be if he can help it. I can look down to my left and see the ribbons of highway, the sparsely populated farmland, the very Heartland of our nation below on this sunny, clear day. I have consumed two overpriced bottled of Sutter Home white wine ($10) of 2004 vintage <snort> and have made the conscious decision to post this to my blog as it…without the benefit of editing later. I’d rather capture the random thoughts swimming through my Sutter Home-soaked head “as is.”
And so I insert the green floppy disk, and begin……..
I’ve had the occasion during this trip to Alexandria, VA, and back to read a good portion of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and find myself once again blown away by the masterpiece within my hands. I’ve reached the end of “Book the First” and am just now prepping to begin the second of three “books” within this novel, and am finding it so full of quotes to pass along that I know I’d never be able to capture them all. What is it about Dickens that I find so appealing? His humor? His satire? His commentary? I would have to answer “all of the above” as I have found that his takes on his own times to be much in line with those of our own, a century-and-a-half later.
Hard Times is a novel full of suspense, humor and tenderness; it is a brilliant defense of art in an age of mechanism. Championing the mind-numbing materialism of the period is Thomas Gradgrind, who opens the novel by arguing that boys and girls should be taught “nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” Forbidding the development of imagination, Gradgrind is ultimately forced to confront the results of his philosophy—his own daughter’s (Louisa) terrible unhappiness.
We can see examples of this rampant materialisms and Fact-based philosophy alive and well in our own modern world as well. Our children today are discouraged, it seems, from dreaming. From philosophy. From asking the questions that really matter…not just those that pertain to balancing a checkbook or managing a portfolio. For while those things are important in this day and age, they are not the things that matter.
“What does it matter?” This is the question Tom Gradgrind’s eldest daughter, Louisa, aged 20, asked of her father when he informed her that Mr. Bounderby, a man best described as a pompous ass aged 50, had proposed to her through her father. Louisa asks her father whether she is to love Bounderby and is given a fact-based rebuttal of the use of the term “love”, and so she acquiesces to her father’s question of marriage with one of her own: “what does it matter?’
Our lives on this earth are short indeed. We must ask ourselves daily, even hourly, about our own actions: what does this matter? But to do so is to appear impractical in today’s mechanized, business-driven world. The world that led me to taking the trip I have in the past 24 hours and in culminating with my writing to you now from Seat 12A. This world saw me fly out to Virginia for a 120 minute meeting “face-to-face” with our client in order to review a document and now sees me fly halfway back across the country. What, indeed, does it matter?
I have written lately about vocations, and had meant to write of this earlier, but will take the occasion now to do so. January 24 was the feast day in the Catholic Church of St. Francis de Sales, a man born in 1567, who wrote a book that I possess on my bedside table The Introduction to a Devout Life. Within the opening pages of his master work, he wrote thusly:
I say that devotion must be practiced in different ways by the nobleman and by the working man, by the servant and by the prince, by the widow, by the unmarried girl and by the married woman. But even this distinction must be adapted to the strength, to the occupation and to the duties of each one in particular.
Tell me…whether it is proper for a bishop to want to lead a solitary life like a Carthusian; or for married people to be no more concerned than a Capuchin about increasing their income; or for a working man to spend his whole day in church like a religious; or on the other hand for a religious to be constantly exposed like a bishop to all the events and circumstances that bear on the needs of our neighbor. Is not this sort of devotion ridiculous, unorganized and intolerable? Yet this absurd error occurs very frequently, but in not way does true devotion destroy anything at all. On the contrary, it perfects and fulfils all things. In fact if it ever works against, or is inimical to, anyone’s legitimate station and calling, then it is very definitely false devotion.
The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them. True devotion does still better. Not only does it not injure any sort of calling or occupation, it even embellishes and enhances it.
Moreover, just as every sort of gem, cast in honey, becomes brighter and more sparkling, each according to its color, so each person becomes more acceptable and fitting in his own vocation when he sets his vocation in the context of devotion. Through devotion your family cares become more peaceful, mutual love between husband and wife becomes more sincere, the service we owe to the prince becomes more faithful, and our work, no matter what it is, becomes more pleasant and agreeable.
They have just given the notice that we are descending into Lincoln for our landing, so I need to shut down…much earlier than anticipated. I guess I will need to finish and edit this after all. It would seem the wine has gotten the best of me and my abilities to be brief and lucid in thought.
Till next time, my dears….be asking yourselves "what does it matter?" If you, like Louisa can come up with no worthy answer, you're not trying hard enough and need to look harder. For surely it does, and you do, matter.