continued from last post
But to most, the idea of freedom is actually a failure.
You see this in so many of our modern youth. They demand their freedom – to do ‘their own thing’ – but when they do, they usually end up standing on street corners wondering what on earth to do.
Those young people who excel still think they are free. But tell me this: what is a great footballer without his team? What is a young concert pianist without his dedication to the culture of music and to the orchestra?
A touch of unfreedom is, it seems, a prerequisite to excelling in life. And an individual can only truly thrive within a culture that allows it. If only we understood this, we may at last produce a society where the balance between freedom and unfreedom is right.
Anthony North
to end on a poetic note
Large Red Man Reading
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,
That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essayist and Poet (1803 – 1882)
