I meander between different genres of lit--lit which often happens to be from days of yore--and enjoy posting from many of said meanderings.
Posts tagged human nature
The need for integration:
In [John] Donne’s age you didn’t separate between your emotions and your intellect as much as we do nowadays, as much as the Romantics did. When you had an idea, you felt the idea with emotional force. When you had an emotion you connected it to the intellect. … What happens after [the age of] Donne is the disassociation of sensibility.
~Dana Gioia, interview with Ken Myers
At age 17 (from a letter, 1839):
Man is a mystery. It must be solved, and if you spend all your life trying to solve it, you must not say the time was wasted; I occupy myself with this mystery, for I wish to be a man.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait, by Jessie Coulson
Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment. Medicine labours to restore ‘natural’ structure or ‘normal’ function. But greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven’s name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? ‘Natural,’ if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.
Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.
This every soul seeketh and for the sake of this doth all her actions, having an inkling that it is; but what it is she cannot sufficiently discern, and she knoweth not her way, and concerning this she hath no constant assurance.
The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who ‘happen to be there.’ Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.
The short span of sixty years can never shut in the whole of man’s imagination; the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy his heart.
The basis of identity:
To hear you [God] speaking about oneself is to know oneself.
~St. Augustine, Confessions
And this is what He speaks:
For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
~St. Paul, Galatians 3:26
And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
~St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 6:11
Remnants of humanity in strange places:
[I]t must be stated that even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation—only the camp doctor, a prisoner himself, had known of it previously—that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town.
[Footnote:] An interesting incident with reference to this SS commander is in regard to the attitude toward him of some of his Jewish prisoners. At the end of the war when the American troops liberated the prisoners from our camp, three young Hungarian Jews hid this commander in the Bavarian woods. Then they went to the commandant of the American Forces who was very eager to capture this SS commander and they said they would tell him where he was but only under certain conditions: the American commander must promise that absolutely no harm would come to this man.
~Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
