Posted by zeugma on October 2, 2005, at 17:54:04
In reply to Re: The albatross » Toph, posted by alexandra_k on October 2, 2005, at 9:45:55
philosophy is like the albatross in Coleridge's poem:
'water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.'
I can't help thinking of these verses of coleridge when reading your invocation of the albatross:
now afflictions bow me down to earth:
nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
but oh! each visitation
suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
my shaping spirit of Imagination.
for not to think of what I needs must feel,
but to be still and patient, all I can;
and haply by abstruse research to steal
from my own nature all the natural man-
this was my sole resource, my only plan:
till that which suits a part infects the whole,
and now is almost grown the habit of my soul."Dejection: An Ode"
But Coleridge who spent all his time reading kant was a better poet than Wordsworth who had a happy marriage, wasn't addicted to opium, didn't have ADD, etc.
Philosophy makes us intolerant of ourselves, and that's a good thing.
But I can't be intolerant of my own errors without suffering affectively.
Being intolerant of oneself is a good thing?
I think that's true, but it seems like a recipe for chronic depression.
"We make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others, but poetry out of the quarrel with ourselves."- W.B. Yeats.
poster:zeugma
thread:561840
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050910/msgs/562025.html