Ever since I can remember, I have had what you might call a hunger
for life (what German romantics or at least their interpreters
would call Sehnsucht).
As a small child, I couldn't really describe it very well. I
remember standing in the playground outside my old elementary school
(when I was about eight years old, before my family moved from Alabama to Georgia and began homeschooling), thinking to myself, "I must
remember this moment. There are trees over there, wind in my
face, the sun overcast with a few clouds behind me, and a fence right
there in front of me. I must remember this moment, so that I
can look back from the future and see what it was like to exist here
and now." I knew that there was something significant in
that moment. I knew that life was something important. I
knew I had many things ahead of me, many unknowns, and that what I
was experiencing right then was somehow meaningful. But I could
not see how. I did not know what life was. I had the
feeling I was going into something, but I couldn't see what (or what
I was supposed to do about it). As a result, I would repeatedly
stop and try to "capture moments" like this one (which
remains lodged more deeply in my memory than most of the later ones,
though I sometimes think I remember some of them, too--memory being
the tricky thing that it is).
As I grew older, my hunger became more concrete (more identified
with definite things in my personal environment). I learned to
satisfy it with particular goods, goods that I encountered in my
personal experience and cultivated as something unique to me.
These goods could be material things, but in my experience they were
always more. I loved books, not because of the paper or the
particular information that they contained, but because there was
something incredibly vital and satisfying about sitting down for
several hours and reading, learning things about animals, people,
places, and things I had never seen (or at least never recognized:
books taught me that each thing in my ordinary experience contains a
world of context to which I remain always more oblivious than not).
I loved books as an experience more than as things.
Significantly, the experiential value of books was always greater
when I chose my own reading. The books I have enjoyed most
throughout my life (from the time I asked my dad to read me The
Lord of the Rings out loud before bedtime as a five-year-old
until now) have been the ones I picked myself. I don't want the
things people want me to have (books, diplomas, car, house, family,
kids, jobs, career, cursus
honorum). I want the experiences I choose for myself
(reading, working, friendship, love, victory and defeat, birth and
death, virtus).
I didn't have words to say this as a little kid, but it was true then
and remains true today.
As I grew up, I learned more about the hunger I carried inside.
I learned that it could be destructive as well as constructive.
The most powerful illustration of its awful power was provided by my
interaction with institutions. Naive and idealistic (like many
before me and many since), I identified unreservedly with the groups
of people around me, constructing my own virtus deliberately
to reflect communal values in the social groups where I
participated. I aimed to be a perfect picture of Mormon virtue
(as taught in my local LDS ward), martial virtue (as taught in my
local martial arts dojo, which was run by a Southern Baptist
preacher), and political virtue (as taught all over in my family,
church, the dojo, and eventually the American universities where I
studied). Looking back, I think that this mistake is inevitable
and even good, but that doesn't make it universally, unreservedly
good (or safe: life is always dangerous, lethally
so). Sometimes, my eagerness to serve the collective paid off
in good ways: I became a good student, a strong kid, and a hard
worker. Other times, not so much: I also became neurotic,
pessimistic (depressive and obsessed with ways in which I fell short
of perfection), and a glutton for others' approval (eager to confess
sins and receive absolution, eager to be commanded in all things,
slow to do things on my own initiative that might turn out "badly"
for my standing with the group that I worshipped too much).
Also, I occasionally lost sight of my own ideals. I was so
concentrated on doing my part for the group that I forgot to take
care of myself. Serving visions of God and fellowman and
country, I lost sight of myself. I lost my own vision.
Committed to collective values, I didn't notice that my own values
were becoming increasingly incoherent and even irrelevant (as I
deliberately smothered my own idea of good to pursue somebody
else's).
For years I did my best to ignore my own visions of good (which
were scarcely coherent anyway, in part because I feared the threat
their coherence might pose to the incoherence increasingly apparent
in the collective values around me). But it was all in vain.
The day finally
came when I awoke--when I found myself sitting under my own bohdi
tree, standing on my own mount of transfiguration,
hearkening to the daimonion
on my own shoulder. The issue of my awakening has been both
positive and negative. On the positive side, I have become much more
aware of what it is that I really value. This makes me easier to
relate to as a person, and has made my friendships more authentic and
enduring. On the negative side, people do not always like what I
value, particularly when they know me only through my ideas (which
occasionally sound much crueler and/or crazier than I like to think I
really am). Expressing my personal virtus makes me obnoxious
to people who wish that I would just sit quietly and like (or at
least pretend to like) what they want me to. Inasmuch as I too feel
dislike, I understand on some level the disgust that I inspire, and I
think I have come up with some good ways of dealing with it—ways of
relating to myself and others that allow us all to be authentic
without compromising unnecessarily or impossibly our conflicting
ideas of what constitutes happiness. In the posts that follow this
one, I want to share some of my ideas about happiness—my own vision
of what “the good life” looks like. While this vision
necessarily includes the visions of others, I don't mean to dictate
what people should like or do. My vision of happiness won't be
yours, and that is as it should be. Like my vision or not as you
please. My aim is always to make it as little obnoxious to you as
possible, as little restrictive of your own moral autonomy as nature
allows.
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