Meditations on Some Meditations

Next month will be 19 years of blogging, albeit with periodic withdrawals due to the rhythm of inspiration, which blows and stops blowing when and where it will.

Even the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how he knows how to do.

And that certainly includes me. I have no idea why the tap turns on or off, but I know when it's off, because that's when I have to write instead vice versa:

Philosophers are not hunters of truths -- truths are the hunters of philosophers.  

And I'm not being hunted -- or haunted -- at the moment. Why try to force the issue? 

The journalist chooses his subjects; the writer is chosen by his subjects.

Besides,  

When everyone wants to be something, it is only decent to be nothing.

Moreover, 

The first step of wisdom is to admit with good humor that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anyone.

But what am I supposed to do with myself if I can't propagate my uninteresting idea to those who aren't interested?

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born predestined to be one. 

Oof. Did I retire too soon? Am I not a true Christian Dudist? 

An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

On the other hand,

The price that intelligence charges to those it chooses is resignation to daily triviality.

Writing about what isn't trivial is my defense against the triviality of existence. Come to think of it,

Observing life is too interesting for one to waste time in living it.

 Is this true? Or just the rationalization for a narrow and uneventful life? 

Those who groan about the narrowness of the place in which they live wish to believe that events, neighbors and landscapes would give them the sensibility and intelligence that nature denied them.

So, proletarian pastimes and bourgeois adventures are vulgar substitutes for sensibility and intelligence?

The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.

A ha. So it's a matter of undergoing a vertical adventure for which horizontal adventures are a kind of pale substitute?

Soul is what gives birth to all the things that last.

I'll buy that. Also its converse, in that the things that last -- that are timeless -- are proof of the soul. 

By the way, 

The unbeliever imagines that religion pretends to give solutions, while the believer knows that it only promises to multiply enigmas.

What could be easier than atheism? I prefer the challenge of reconciling religion and science, or the vertical and horizontal. 

Impartiality is less attractive than the partiality that views itself with irony.

Partly because

Ideas betray us if we do not betray them beforehand. We must only be faithful to the complexity of things.

 At the same time, there is an objective reality. For example.

The greatest discovery we can make in ethics is that in ethics one cannot make discoveries.

As they say, a law that isn't grounded in the nature of things is no law at all.

Now, here is something to ponder:

The proofs of faith are internal to faith, as those of the sciences are internal to science.  

No existing interpretations are universally valid. A religious interpretation is grotesque in a secular context, just as a secular interpretation is grotesque in a religious context. 

It's easy enough to prove the necessity of God -- or someone like him -- with a little metaphysical diddling. But in order to make it fruitful, one must undertake a religious practice. It's like the difference between knowing all about musical theory vs. picking up an instrument and learning how to play.

It seems a practice is to religion what method is to science. In neither case should these be confused with their content, or one ends in idolatry on the one hand or scientism on the other. In short, it is a mistake to absolutize anything but the Absolute.

The other day we spoke of how Romanticism was a kind of attempt to resuscitate the corpse of verticality from within the new tyranny of horizontality: 

The great writers from Romanticism onward are prisoners frantically shaking the bars of the jail into which they turned the world without God.

But the doors are locked from the inside? In any event, 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, man becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

It's a right-brain thing:

Proofs for the existence of God are the ideology of the feeling of His presence in the soul.

 Not that this proof answers every question. To the contrary,

To give a religious answer to the enigma of the world is a less sure sign of religiosity than to confront it with a religious question.

In any event,

We have reached such an extreme of ineptitude that we only believe to be real what would persist if the arts were abolished.

When the most real is at the summit of the vertical hierarchy. About which -- as Thomas says -- "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God." Thus, 

It is not our knowledge that sometimes makes us feel superior, but the quality of our ignorance compared to others’ knowledge.

Then again,  

Each one clings to the snobbery that he can.