Thoughts Before Work Tonight

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama (pictured above making cheese soufflet in his home)

I had a fine day today. I went to Tim Hortons, had Chocolate milk, listened to a good lecture by a genius historian (Prof. Sainsbury) and then had an actually good Latin class! craziness. Then I had a great lunch, and when I came home I decided I needed my Simon Schama fix so I lay down on the couch and watched him compare Ireland and India. He even talked about Thomas Babington Macaulay whom I had researched without remembering Schama talked about him.

Now I'm just waiting to go to work. It's been a good day, but it's weird having the fear of work and prospective essays looming over you. Then I realized: this is my life. I'm only viewing it on a daily cycle though. Like why should I relax the day before I work if I just have to work the next day? ANd I'll have to work my entire life, so really this, "just get through it" attitude is really the bane of my existence. What's the point in toughing out your entire life?

When I think about History and Schama and the job of a Historian I constantly think about how many people have gone before me. The Romans had a phrase we translated in Latin the other day. It was "to go to the majority", and it meant 'to die'. They saw the majority as those already dead. Schama said 1 million Irish died in the potato famine of the 1840s and 5 million people starved in India during one famine. 6 million people, dead.

...

What were their lives like? What did they think of God? What did they love and hope for?

I guess we'll never know. And one day I will 'go to the majority'. And people like Simon Schama (and myself) will write essays about me as one of the beleagured multitude. They'll try to place me into a group that all sought one clear goal, that fit somewhere. Whether I'm a proletarian wage slave who died working in a grocery store, or one of the many morbidly obese Canadians of the post-modern period who died from heart faillure due to excess, or one of the 'faithful departed' in a liturgy (better than unfaithful departed).

...

What kind of an account will I give for my life? I can picture it now: "Hi... I'm (name), I was of the (religion) faith, does that mean I'm in? ....Yes that's correct, mhmm glutton, lustful, etc yep. ... Ya I guess I was a Capitalist? is that bad comrade? ...oh I see...well I only shopped at Walmart because it was so cheap, though I guess that doesn't count... alright ... Ya I only did that with one girlfriend ..." and then the questions get even weirder "... well ya, I preferred Charles I to Oliver Cromwell ...but you do remember what he did to Ireland... oh you saw that on my facebook" It's so unimaginable to think of such an epic ending to such a transitory life.

So little of life is epic, so much of it just the drab everyday. So much isn't about Ideals, but rather endless compromise.

...

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd just do whatever the hell I wanted. I know that's kind of against the point, but seriously, it'd be like being invincible. It reminds me of when the Romans had trouble fighting the Germanic tribes because they believed in the immortality of the soul so strongly, they had no fear of death.

...

Plato makes a pretty good argument for the immortality of the soul.

...

well I guess I'll get ready for work.

Music as a Cure

When I get depressed certain songs help. I've already posted a ton of zelda songs I like listening to, so there's no use in posting more of that.

A song that I've savoured for the last bit is the blue danube waltz by Strauss:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTYymbbEL4

One of my favourite games from childhood was called Earthbound for SNES and this is a theme from it that I played on a piano in England all the time. It's a part of the soundtrack of my life:

here's a remix of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQMsr3fStwE

I feel better already.

Loneliness & Despair on a Tuesday Night

In an episode of SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy satire they put the words "I'm so terribly lonely" in the mouth of Martha Stewart.

In a song I listened to recently the words were sung by Deathcab For Cutie "all the girls in all the girlie magazines won't make me feel, any less alone"

My favourite poem since high school (when we read it in Fahrenheit 451) ends with these words

"...the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night." - Matthew Arnold "Dover Beach"

On nights like this I usually agree with him. I just want to go to sleep and never wake up again.

God help me.

Latin, The Girl, and the Trip That Never Is

I switched my courses tonight for Brock. I decided to take Latin. I HAVE to learn it eventually for a masters in history or theology, so it was only a matter of time. Personally, I would've liked to put it off for a couple more years.

Languages are a funny thing for me, because I love them, I love the idea of speaking another language or reading it. But mostly Latin because it is the language of our history, the eternal langua Romani (Language of the Romans). I feel impowered when I know another language, I feel as if I could be a whole different person. For me, language is a many splendoured thing. But in honesty I suck at Latin. I tried alot, but never came up with enough effort to master the material. I hated the tenses and the necessity of precise endings, etc. I'm terrible at Latin, and so I'm conflicted, it's as if this door is open in front of me, and everyone tells me (including myself) that if I just tried hard enough I could get through it. But at the same time I'm weighed down with sloth and grammatical ignorance and I can't make it through.

There's a girl I saw tonight, the chances of her reading this blog are minimal so I don't mind posting it. Though it would be a typical chapter in my life if she saw it this one time. Anyway, this girl I saw tonight is a genius, and we have everything in common. I can't think of a time when I've been more foolish than when I tried to ask her out. It might possibly be the dumbest I've ever been. It was generic, obvious, and awkward. I was heart-broken for a while...actually I don't know if I have a heart, but I was very upset. In any case, she is not at all interested in me, but whenever I see her it's like the open door. I have this beautiful image of how happy I could be if we were even just friends, but I can't seem to make it. Again I'm weighed down and in my mind I keep telling myself ('it's your own fault' just like Latin). It makes me hate myself as I look at my gross unshaven gay-tee, and my morbidly obese sized t-shirts. I want to speak Latin, I want people to like me, I want to run again, I want to be healthy and suave and fit.

Finally, I have a trip that got postponed again, it's the 4th time now and I'm furious. I can't ask my boss for the 4th time to reschedule me. I'm so angry at my parents. It's totally out of my control, and it shows how little they respect me or my life. But obviously if I can't do anything right, why would they?

It's painfully clear to me what my Summum Bonum, my greatest good, is. To love myself enough to start running, to love my future enough to study Latin night and day and ace the class, and to then win the affections of the girl and live much more happily, for a little while at least.

God if you're listening, please help me. But I'm never as certain about anything as I am that I will fail. I will drag myself through latin, possibly dropping it, failing, or barely passing. I will embarrass myself infront of the girl and focus her annoyances on me into dislike, and I will remain the same blob, sitting in bed, crying out to God, crying out on this blog, crying out to the no one who is listening. Such seems my life.

But maybe everything will change, maybe I will acheive my Summum Bonum, that I will feel Eudaimonea. That small pathetic hope lives on somewhere in the cynicism and pessimism of my soul, and that is why I will wake up tomorrow, and read a chapter of my latin book, and go to work, and try to eat healthy. In the hope that everything might change. Tolkien taught me hope, and I don't know whether to blame or thank him for it.

Domine misere mei.

Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness.

^that's an album by Smashing Pumpkins that my brother lent me in high school, but it was too depressing for me so I only listened to it like twice.

The last few weeks have felt like nothing but a long line of people yelling at me, and a long line of of opportunities that I've had completely failed. I feel like an extra in my own life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_(actor). Or like the villain at least.

In the movie Star Trek, Spock's dad says to him as a child 'you're perfectly capable of determining your own destiny. The question you face is, will you be the hero of your own story' and I sometimes wonder if I'm the hero of my own life, I don't think I am. Maybe if Leonard Cohen wrote my life story I would be (he's an ecentric, depressing author).

I find it interesting how beauty is so fleeting. As Canadian rockers, Our Lady Peace once said immortally, "happiness is a fish you can't catch". That's it! I feel like I'm in an Our Lady Peace Song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8HcIu1z2OE&feature=fvst ....well at least I've figured that out.

I'm just ranting and complaining again because I have to do something, I feel like life is so infinitely sad that I can't even handle it. I mean, it's just contrasted really. It's infinitely beautiful as well. There are some moments that are so amazing that it makes the darkness around it seem so bad. If life was just constantly sad then we wouldn't even feel sad, we'd just feel normal. The "problem" is that it can be so good.

When everything is good, who has the time to write blogs!? you're too busy enjoying the goodness. I guess life has to be so dramatically up and down, that's a comfort. I bet it's the only way we wouldn't go crazy. I guess some days I just wish to be God then. Not in the power hungry, totalitarian way, just the being at peace with existence way. I'm constantly diseased. DIS EASED, dis-eased, un-ease, dis-ease, Ease meaning comfort, normalcy, etc.

Anyway, right now I miss my gradeschool friends, I hate myself for not keeping in touch with them, I miss my capernwray friends, I hate myself for not keeping in touch with them, and at the same time I don't want to be in touch with anyone, I just want to lay in the grass forever and be at peace, or drift in a boat in the ocean. Solitude can mean peace sometimes. But so can friendship.

Unfathomed Sorrow and Music Great and Terrible

"He governs the flowing of all waters, and the ebbing, the courses of all rivers and the replenishment of springs, the distilling of all dews and rain in every land beneath the sky. In the deep places, He gives thought to music great and terrible; and the echo of that music runs through all the veins of the world in sorrow and in joy; for if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomed at the foundations of the Earth" - J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion, describing the god/demi-god of the sea: Ulmo.

"Melkor hated the Sea, for he could not subdue it." - Silmarillion (Melkor was a god who rebelled against the One God ie, the Satan figure).

I like this description of the ocean and the insights Tolkien creates about the divine, that from the same springs joy and unfathomed sorrow arise. A biographer of Tolkien once said that after his mother and father's deaths, for John (Tolkien) the crucifix remained the prime symbol of human existence, and reminded him that no life could occur without suffering, for God to become man it meant suffering, and so even at the moment of greatest victory - Christ's victory on the cross - there always remains sorrow.

It reminds me of a story of a man whose son had died long before him as a young man. The Author wrote that perhaps the scriptures say that no one can look into the face of God and live because he is so full of sorrow. We would see the infinite sadness and die.

For some reason I love that image. It's terrible - I really don't know why - but it reminds me of Jurgen Moltmann's comment that "A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any human being".

Theologically it's untenable, and I don't really believe it, but in my heart I tend to enjoy the anthropormism of such thoughts, they reflect the OT well when it says that "God regretted that he made man" etc. I think that emotion and suffering give us meaning in everyday life.

But I like Tolkien's writing because it gives you a sense of the greatness, the glory, the majesty, the Mysterium Tremendum of the entire Universe and the incomprehensibility of the Almighty, and the pettiness of humanity. About how man always wants to conquer, to fight for significance, but how much bigger the forces are around him.

Tolkien gets me through alot, he's one of my favourite authors, and Roman Catholics.

I love his phrases like "music great and terrible" - it reminds me of listening to classical music on a piano in a thunderstorm, or sitting in a small room in my house late at night listening to CBC radio and an opera or a symphony or a Nocturne.

You can get through life when it is great and terrible, it's monotony that kills us.

I love the term mysterium tremendum it comes from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (which I really want to read) but I found a quote from his book that reminds me of all that I've been trying to say, he defines the great mystery as:

"The wholly other, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible and the familiar, which . . . fills the mind with blank wonder and astonishment."

He says when people think about God, grace, salvation, etc the person,

"feels a something which captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often to the pitch of dizzying intoxication"

That's my spirituality I think, that's why I love the stars, that's why I love reading the Pantheists and Deists and Enlightenment philosophers, that's why I love Tolkien.

"Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe." - Rudolf Otto

Today and the Serenity Prayer

I've had quite a few weeks of essays and seminar leading, and other school crap, etc. Today I finished my Essay on Obama and Hillary with less than 40 minutes to spare. It was cutting it close, but now I can rest a little.

This morning I woke up and my first thought was 'today is going to suck'. I then sat there thinking for a while. Why would I choose to live if today is going to suck. I decided that I wasn't going to let today suck, sure it was stressful, but I'm just trying to be happy about doing things. I try to remember that life isn't that bad, and that I will have fun again, but most importantly that even if things do go badly, that's ok, life isn't always fun, it isn't always overly joyous, but at the same time, I can be content, I can be optimistic even if things aren't great.

I've been thinking about school and work tonight and possibly buying the WoW expansion tomorrow to start it up again, but I've been trying to think honestly that if nothing else goes right in life, I'm still going to have to find a way to be happy about today, and maybe I should try to be happy without 'quick fixes' like material possessions, video games, food, etc. Maybe I could just be grateful to be alive and enjoy myself as I am right now. All of this sounds extremely trite and simple, but I'm still trying to just live this way, so for me this was all revolutionary.

I'm not an alcoholic but I still love the serenity prayer:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

Taking, as He did, this sinful world

as it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things right

if I surrender to His Will;

That I may be reasonably happy in this life

and supremely happy with Him

Forever in the next.

Amen." -Reinhold Niebuhr

I was going to analyze the lines I like, but I realize that every line is awesome. Today I'm thinking about the line "That I may be reasonably happy in this life". Still finding my daily Eudaimonea...

I'm going to have to memorize this, and read some of Niebuhr's stuff.

Prayer

I should be writing on my theology blog if it's about God or Religion, but I post on here because I know nobody reads it and I can get out my really personal thoughts.



2 days ago a friend asked me to pray for her on the phone. I don't remember how to pray to God the right way anymore. I don't even know if I believe in prayer. I have all the arguments and logically I can accept it, it's just personally I don't know if I think God even likes me, I've abused our friendship too much. (Now's where protestants will attack me) But I've been praying to the saints alot recently. I mean I believe they're going to him anyway, but it just seems easier to talk to a dead person than a deity. So I've been praying to Our Lady in latin, I feel like a medieval peasant so it just seemed right.



Ave Maria, Gratia Plena, Dominus Tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus. Sancte Maria, Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis pecatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis, nostrae.



I'm terrified about so much in life right now, I have so many essays - I don't know how I'm going to get through it. I gave up World of Warcraft. I have a drivers test that i'm scared about too. I'm so angry at life in general, I hate it, I hate me. I feel so incredibly weak and scared about everything.



I was listening to the radio yesterday night and heard the story of Abraham and Jehovah Jireh - the Lord will provide. I just hope he provides me with some help or angels or something and with a hope and reason for living (and again if someone does read this, you probably know that i'm too cowardly to commit suicide, I'd just never do that). But I would like my life to mean more than struggling to survive, please those around me, be thin, and get a piece of paper (history degree).