Passion, Part I

As a kid, I was Emerson's transparent eye-ball. My senses took in everything, vividly: ferns, Dave Niehaus' voice from the '78 Toyota's radio, the metallic smell of the monkey bars, the spinning skateboard beneath my feet and the earth below it, the jungle green brontosaurus in my dinosaur books. I enjoyed my lungs burningly and everything my body came across became Memory, and all that vivid Memory became Me.

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I recently read an article about Giacomo Leopardi and his dark poetry in The New Yorker. He wrote, "Reason is the enemy of everything great; reason is the enemy of nature; nature is great and reason is small." Leopardi strongly believed that happiness is illusion and the happiest time in life is childhood; "in historical terms, the happiest people were Leopardi's beloved Greeks, who still believed in the Gods and in eternal glory. On the other hand, a modern educated European, whose sees the world through the cold lens of reason, is the unhappiest person imaginable." So says Adam Kirsch, the author of the article. Leopardi claimed that reason is a "barbarous teaching," and he went onto say, "Since human pleasures and pains are mere illusions, the anguish deriving from the certainty of nothingness of things is always the only true reality."

For me, it is not the nothingness that interests me--I myself am certain it awaits me--but the illusions.

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Inspired by long-dead Leopardi, I've begun reading about the traveling bards in Greece during the time of Homer, which was about 800 BCE. The book is called Travelling Heroes, and I've read 15 pages. It's written by a man named Robin Lane Fox whose preface includes Indiana Jones-esque anecdotes about climbing to the top of Jebel Aqra despite the Turkish soldiers and spending hours in the library reading through Assyrian sources. The book feels so thorough, so typed, so sure in its method and purpose and prose, I feel like I'm back in the sureness of 20th-century.

In his first page, in a long wonderful passage which I've shortened, Fox writes, "Homer's heroes think in their "hearts," not their brains; like us, they can disown an idea or impulse, but they often disown it as if it has come from outside or from an independent sources; they have no word for a decision and because they are not yet philosophers they have no word for the self." A few pages later he states that life in Greece tended to be short, that "the adults tended to die young...in the prime of life, say between 17 and 40 years." Between the ages of 13-24, people were already experiencing "degenerative joint diseases." If you beat the "index of life," you got to join a council or became a priestess.

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In summary: 1) Reason is the enemy of illusion; 2) the certainty of nothingness is the one true reality; 3) Greeks thought with their hearts, with glorious illusion of fate, with no sense of self; 4) they died young.

These points all relate to an important dilemma to not only me but the lives of us, the committed: In a society structured and demanding of reason, a society where delighting in imagination is vanishing, a society where imagination is only valuable if it supports our materialistic cravings, a society where being realistic is seen as the opposite of insanity, a society where a human like me can live for a really long time, a society that believes none of this means anything, that there are no Hera's and Zeus's, how does one keep his passions alive? How does one allow his life to be driven by a creative, imaginative, illusory passion? How does one stay engaged and enamored with life for a lifetime when a lifetime lasts so long and means so little? How does one continue to take it all in, vividly?