Science on Boredom

"It cannot be helped: boredom is not simple. We do not escape boredom ... with a gesture of impatience or rejection" (Roland Barthes, 1973)

The rhetoric of boredom thus gives a critical edge to Hegel's writings on Dutch art. Indeed, Heidegger would later declare that boredom was the fundamental mood of modernity. Subsequent critical studies of boredom have argued that this mood is a variable and historically specific symptom. Goodstein defines boredom in terms of the democratisation of scepticism, a widespread loss of certainty about the transcendental meaningfulness of everyday existence. She emphasises the historicity of a mood that seems to defy the passing of time, and contends that discursive awareness of anomie as an endemic social experience first emerged in the seventeenth century. Expressing the alienation and estrangement of people in secular urban commercial centres, the rhetoric of boredom accompanies the freedoms brought about by the fragmentation of inherited systems of value and external social controls. The discourse of boredom, in other words exposes the limitations of new freedoms, especially the loss of transcendent meaning. Both Goodstein and Reinhard Kuhn have analysed writings on boredom from the17th to the early 20th Century.

[...] Heidegger describes these characteristics as: being left empty and being held limbo. For Heidegger, boredom is a threshold experience; it takes its victims temporally out of the world and holds them in an unsettling state of limbo in which being and time are suspended or drawn out and thus made conspicuous. Langeweile, the German term for boredom, conveys this sense of the lengthening of time and also connotes the sensation of homesickness or world alienation. Heidegger urges his interlocutors not to fight boredom by killing time, filling it with pastimes and diversions. Rather, boredom should be awakened and approached with a listening attitude, for its emptiness holds great potential, offering 'a space in which to play'. This indeterminate space, Heidegger contends, opens opportunities for introspective reflection on everyday subjective experience. Suspending the flow of secular time, the experience of profound boredom prompts awareness of time itself, potentially allowing the bored subject to situate the narrow subjective time of mundane existence within the whole of time.

p.1012 in Boredom's Threshold: Dutch Realism by Angela Vanhalen. Association of Art Historians 2012. 

Education and university

Interesting quote from
'Public Value of the Humanities' Bloomsbury Publishing.

The article argues the need and importance of humanities taught in universities. Sometimes, when money is an issue, humanities are one of the first departments to feel the financial pressure and significant cuts in financing. This article helps to see a bigger picture and opens our eyes towards humanitarian subject that hopefully will make others realize its importance in societal and global context.

p.21
"The idea of the university was promised upon a god: the university was a 'place of teaching universal knowledge' (Newman 1852:v)

p.22
University was to provide:
-Training in the art of argument
-The platonic university is a place where young people learn to think. Their starting point must be the art of thinking disinterestedly, not instrumentally.

p.26
Work in the humanities includes what Matthew Arnold called 'disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that has been known and thought in the world'. Are we to deprive future generations of that learning and propagation? But the humanities do not end there. They include understanding ourselves and other peoples through the language, literature, art, music history, religion, philosophy, sense of identity, politics, desires, fears and ambitions, all of which animate ourselves and others, whether these are the best or not. We are asked whether this understanding is a public good, deserving public support, or merely a private hobby. The answer is that if you believe knowledge is too expensive, try ignorance. The human world is one in which we move and act, just as much as the natural world, which is the object of science. Misunderstanding either is the road to catastrophe; understanding each of them is our only salvation".

Art in theory

And so I began my art classes and I must say, they are the best classes I have been enrolled onto in a long time (at University of Oslo). We have best lecturers here with their philosophy and their thoughts that I can definitely relate to. Through art, we are given a possibility to get a better perspective on this world' events, and life in general. How does art relate to the sociatal structure of our world, even to political events perhaps. I can greatly appreciate it especially, taken all my previous experiences with people who had more materialistic view of art. I do not deny that art can be also materialistic and practical.

But I am more interested in its cultural aspect, how it unites people, ideas, how it can change our perspective on things, and, most importantly, the power of it, how it helped and helps to shape and change history. And these are topics that are being discussed!

Couple of further posts will be extracts from my current readings, and notes from lectures and seminars, so stay tuned if you are interested in the topic!

Art in Theory

Habermas, Jürgen: “Modernity” - An Incomplete Project” (1980) in Art in Theory 1900-1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishers 1992, pp. 1000-1008

p.1004

Max Weber characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are: science, morality, and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18C, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalised. [...]

Enlightenment thinkers of the cast of mind of Condorcet still had the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces but also understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings. The 20C has shattered this optimism. The differentiation of science, morality and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the specialist and their separation from the hermeneutics of everyday communication. This  splitting off is the problem that has given rise to efforts to 'negate' the culture of expertise. But the problem won't go away: should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause? I now want to return to the problem of artistic culture [...]  

Beautiful quote from a beautiful movie

“I have always believed in numbers. In the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career. The most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love, that any logical reasons can be found. I’m only here tonight because of you. You are the reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you.” - A Beautiful Mind. 

Are we all in pursue to acquire high statuses, to impress people around ourselves and to self advertising when we travel through cultures and religions of the world?

"Despite these structures, there is often the effort to bring into one's social world what Pierre Bourdieu terms 'cultural capital': knowledge from the cultural supermarket that one can display to one's social credit, justifying and bolstering one's social position. One's interest, at least within some segments of American society, in Indian ragas as apposed to top 40 hits, or in Tibetian Buddhist writings as opposed to evangelical Christian tracts, is a way of advertising cosmopolitan discernment: my far-flung tastes may well be the servant of my local strategy of impressing the people around me. The matter of what from the cultural supermarket can provide status in a given social milieu is highly complex. Each social milieu has its rating system for information and identities from the cultural supermarket; individuals seek to attain maximum credit and credibility, not only through consumption within the existing cultural rating system, but also through bringing in new information and identities, whose high status they seek to establish. The criteria for the establishment of such status are thus highly specific and flexible. Individuals play the game with an extraordinary acute sense of its implicit rules and strategies.

But all this is not to claim that there is absolutely no room for individual choice from the cultural supermarket. Why does one person thrill to Bach, another to juju? Why does one person become a Christian, another a Buddhist? Why does one person revel in their ethnicity, while another spurns that ethnicity? Why does one person travel the world while another stays at home? Much can be predicted about our choices by considering such factors as social class, educational level, income, gender, and age, as well as personal histories, but not everything can be predicted. We are not slaves to the world around us, but have (in a social if not philosophical sense) a certain degree of freedom in choosing who we are. This freedom may be highly limited, but it cannot be altogether denied.

From Intercultural Communication: Identity by Holliday A, Hyde M and Kullman J, p.99

Horizon of expectations

In the speech, Khruschev once claimed that communism was already visible on the horizon. When a listener asked, 'Comrade Khruschev, what does "horizon" mean?', the leader advised him to consult a dictionary. There, the listener found the following entry: 'Horizon, an apparent line that separates the earth from the sky and disappears as you approach it.'

The 'horizon of expectations' is only partly structured by experience; events do not always coincide with expectations, although those expectations are, of course, strongly influenced by their prehistory in the 'space of experience.' In the modern world, this tension between experience and expectation evokes a different experience of history. Partly because of the disintegration of the Christian concept of the Judgement Day, the 'horizon of expectation' moves up, and the future becomes 'less attached' to the past. At the same time, an eventual improvement of one's fate is less likely 'in the hereafter' and more likely 'in the present,' an experience that manifests itself in the emerging use of the concept of 'progress'.

From Art in Progress by Maarten Doorman p.24

‘My Self’ by Wergeland (Norwegian poet)

"My soul rejoices in the spring joys of Heaven

and shall partake of the Earth’s.

It glows more intensely than the spring stars, and it

Will soon blossom with the flowers.

Wondrous evening star. I bare my head.

Like a shower of crystals your radiance falls upon it.

There is a kinship between the soul and the stars".

Vigeland on Art

"People want to know 'the meaning'; they do not care about the rest. They want to be able to take out 'the idea' and 'the meaning' and put it back again like a book on a shelf. As though 'the meaning' were the most valuable aspect of a work of art. Look at the grandest of all works of art, Michelangelo's 'Dio crea il sole et la luna'.This work goves the impression of undiluted passion (aside from cracks, and so on) today as before, even though we all know that that was not how the solar system was created. - No, if one cannot allow oneself to be lifted, if one is not capable of being entranced by a work of art, transported by it, then one will never 'understand' it. People usually stand in front of a work of art with a stiff neck, rather than with bowed head. In fact, one must approach a piece of art with the mind of a child. Otherwise you will never understand it".

Notes on Art Education

Cultural Sustainability, cultural engagement and visual culture plays a big role in development of values and the transferring of belief systems.

Visual art making acknowledges previous learning, personal meaning making, the real world and audience. It presents a platform for critical self reflection and a space to facilitate the ongoing mediation of society, cultural values and citizenship.

It would have been interesting to explore how art making affirms our consciousness about the world and self through creative engagement and communicative knowing. How can we develop students’ capacities to engage creatively with learning in environments that provide opportunities for thoughtful participatory understanding about self as a citizen of the world, or as a citizen of the world, or as a member of none’s national or local community. It is identifying and reflecting that an understanding of one’s world is dependant on knowing how contemporary society communicates its values and beliefs informed by economic, environmental, cultural and political forces. In a world dominated by the triumpth of the image, multi-modal practices and visual culture (Duncum, 2003), being visually literate is fundamental, and having the skills to creatively engage with communicative knowing within the dominant discourse is essential to the active construction of an individual’s values, beliefs and identities.

Source: Creative Engagements with Visual Culture, Communicative Knowing, Citizenship and ContemporaryVisual Art Education 
Kathryn Grushka, University of Newcastle

Three Dilemmas of Virtue

[...] Each of the three older Pendawas are commonly held to display a different sort of emotional-moral dilemma, centering one or another of the central Javanese virtues. Yudistira, the eldest, is too compassionate. He is unable to rule his country effectively because when asks him for his land, his wealth, his food, he simply gives it out of pity, leaving himself powerless, poor, or starving. His enemies continually take advantage of his mercifulness to deceive him and escape his justice.

Bima, on the other hand, is single-minded, steadfast. Once he forms and intention, he follows it out straight to its conclusion; he doesn’t look aside, doesn’t turn off or idle along the way – “he goes north”. As a result, he is often rash, and blunders into difficulties he could as well have avoided.

Arjuna, the third brother, is perfectly just. His goodness comes from the fact that he opposes evil, that he shelters people from injustice, that he is coolly courageous in fighting for the right. But he lacks a sense of mercy, of sympathy for wrong-doers. He applies a divine moral code to human activity, and so he is often cold, cruel, or brutal in the name of justice.

The resolution of these three dilemmas of virtue is the same: mystical insight. With a genuine comprehension of the realities of the human situation, a true perception of the ultimate rasa, comes the ability to combine Yudistira’s compassion, Bima’s will to action, and Arjuna’s sense of justice into a truly moral outlook, an outlook which brings an emotional detachment and an inner peace in the midst of the world of flux, yet permits and demands a struggle for order and justice within such a world. And it is such a unification that unshakable solidarity among the Pendawas in the play, continually rescuing one another from the defects of their virtues, clearly demonstrates.

Book: The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973

Author: Clifford Geertz

Chapter: Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols p. 139.

The definition of home.

What is home? For some it is a house, for others - people.  For others it is where them and their loved ones are. No mater where in the world, no matter what cultures they are endorsed into. As long as they have their close ones next to them, they are at home.

Home for us is where we feel free, where we feel needed, where we feel the belonging. Home can be anywhere where there is a feeling of warmth and genuinity from people who surround us. We want a place where we can be accepted the way we are and do not have to constantly prove ourselves. We want a place with occasional sad faces, we don’t want to be only surrounded by fake smiles. We want to be able to read into people’s minds, their worries, try to understand them, try to help them.

We want a place where we can have time to care about other people. We also want a decent level of life, we want some certainty in the future where we see a good future for our next generation. We want to be living in communities where there is a sharing of values, where people have a common goal to pursue. Decent life does not cost much, if we construct it in a clever way, it can cost nothing. Money were invented by us people anyway, as a product of exchange. It can be replaced by the sharing of knowledge and capabilities.

We can all feel home wherever we are.

Question everything. Search for meaning.

We search for the meaning in everything we do. Otherwise what is the point one might ask. Stop. Think. Do we question ourselves why we are having hundreds of friends, do we question why we go out and have fun every so often. What is ‘fun’ anyway. Are they occasional moments of our life when we displace ourselves from our boring everyday existence and get lost in a drunken couple of hours. Why not invest some time and energy in building up on a life that we dont want to escape from. Why do not let our hobbies, our passions become our way of making a living? What if we create a life we love and do not want to escape from. Where we can be in the moment, be happy.

When we find that inner strength, the knowing we have inside of ourselves, life seem much easier, and simpler. What is the point of overanalysing, over thinking anyway? Whatever in meant to be, will happen. All we have to do, is do our best, make ourselves happy by pushing our limitations, not forgetting that they are as subjective as anything else in this world. Humans are incredible creatures; they are capable of at least ten times more of what they think they are. Believe in oneself and everyone else will believe in us.

Of course, it is never that easy. Being an individual is difficult when we are tied to social environments. We have family, our close ones are sometimes in need of our help, they need us to share their unfortunes, ills and downs. Stay creative with own thoughts during these moments, not letting them drown us. Invest our time and energy, showing our compassion, and seeing it as a positive. When helping others, we consequently make ourselves stronger, receive that extra energy, extra push to hold on to our personal believes and our dreams. By helping others and caring about what is going on around us in the world, does not let us concentrate too much on our personal problems, that can only push us to the bottom and will make others around us weaker. For the sake of the loved ones around us, stay strong.

The importance of Art Education

Researching into Art and its importance of giving it a significant placement within our societies.

Personal perspective:

The more we travel the more capabilities we have to absorb and critically overlook our world with its people and surroundings. We grow, we learn, we get wiser, but it does not become easier, rather the opposite, to understand this world, humanity in general. Traveling the world and speaking several languages does not solve any problems and cannot contribute to the magic formula of gaining the control over the world structure. It raises even more questions instead, seeing all the complexities of human soul, you cannot but wonder about its similarities, as well is it predictabilities. You become overly self-critical as you recognize some of flaws in yourself, seeing yourself from many perspective sets you in a difficult position of occasional over analysis, which sometimes is critical to our happiness and careless existence. But as much as you would have wanted to turn the clocks backwards and go back to simplicity and childish view of the world, it is impossible. You want to climb more to fill in all the gaps, to get all your questions answered. The biggest challenge in this case is to start moving in the opposite direction: to learn how to stop, relax, embrace yourself in the moment and meditate. Another solution is to stop caring about your own fulfillment, which is very much propagandised by many western societies, but rather start caring about others, which might save yourself a soul and sanity. Such journey can be difficult and it easy to get lost among endless opportunities and ideas.

Here comes the importance of creativity and art. Vision of the world as something that is based on principles, grids and models is rather abstract and to be honest, rather depressing thought. Any creative act, be it traveling, attending an art exhibition, or having a stimulating and challenging conversation, let us start re-evaluating our personal ambitions, dreams, challenges acquired perspectives, values and principles. Art and ‘creative act’ keep our motivation on the high, without letting us to get bored by accepting our life routines. 

Art also challenges our materialistic values. The importance of family and love is evident and yet many people in the western world tend to forget this simple truth. What one might call ‘simple’ life, is one of the richest in reality. What can be more important that being in the company of people who you know care about you, love you in any way. What can be more valuable then a walk or a chat to a person whose words you know will stay with you and become part of your soul forever. All things material age, people die, but their souls, their love and their creations live on. So isn’t it the most valuable thing in the world? Art helps societies, communities and younger generations to find this spiritual connection through creative exercises. Some might argue that this is an overly simplistic, or maybe overly spiritualistic way of looking at things, that we need economic growth, we need stimuli to keep the humanity grow and develop and this is also very right. I believe that everyone chooses how to balance their lives, which consequently creates a balance on the bigger scale in this world between people of all kinds – sky walkers, dreamers, thinkers, painters, high climbers, money and power grabbers. In the ideal world everyone has this balance within one selves, where we have place for love, care, our children, our work, our passions and hobbies. But it is difficult to achieve in the society where arrogance and money serve as main stimuli. We need to rethink. We need to invest more in non-material things, such as education, art, sustainability and communities.  

Creative Engagements with Visual Culture, Communicative Knowing, Citizenship and

Contemporary Visual Art Education

Kathryn Grushka, University of Newcastle

Article discusses why it is important to develop students’ capacities to engage creatively with learning in environments that provide opportunities for thoughtful participatory understanding about self as a citizen of the world, or as a member of one’s national or local community.

Abstract

New learning in a global society gives attention to the need for learners to engage in constructive, meaningful and transformative processes which have communicative relevance to themselves. It acknowledges the need for cultural sustainability, and the vital role cultural engagement, particularly visual culture plays in development of values and the transferring of belief systems.

Visual art making acknowledges previous learning, personal meaningmaking, the real world and audience while providing authentic learning experiences. It presents as a platform for critical self-reflection and a space to facilitate the ongoing mediation of society, cultural values and citizenship. An examination of visual art curriculum, 5 years of Higher School Certificate art works in NSW and student reflections reveal a rich imagery of how student artists use their art making to affirm their consciousness about the world and self through creative engagement and communicative knowing and is presented as a legitimate site for the negotiation of ones subjectivities and life worlds

Where is Happiness these days?

Despite the fact that we are now healthier and grow to be older, despite the fact that even the least affluent among us are surrounded by material luxuries undreamed of even a few decades ago (there were few bathrooms in the palace of the Sun King, chairs were rare even in the richest medieval houses, and no Roman emperor could turn on a TV set when he was bored), and regardless of all the stupendous scietific knowledge we can summon at will, people often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom.

[...] Hapiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a conclusion that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

[...] One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for - rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires. He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires. [...] The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces. It is no longer necessary to struggle for goals that always seem to recede into the future, to end each boring day with the hope for tomorrow [...]. We must also become independent from the dictates of the body, and learn to take charge of what happens in the mind. Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there. As long as we obey the socially conditioned stimulus-response patterns that exploit our biological inclinations, we are controlled from the outside.

"Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them". Epictetus.

"If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is your power to wipe out that judgment now". Marcus Aurelius.

[...] If we do actually success in becoming richer, or more powerful, we believe, at least for a time, that life as a whole has improved. But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent. And the reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom like is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.



(From the book "Flow-Psycjology of optimal experience" by Michaly Csikszentmihalyi

Cultural insights into Scandinavia.

Many of my friends were puzzled when I have chosen a small town, up in the north of Denmark, Aalborg, over the ‘city of dreams’ and of great buzz, London. The answer was easy. I wanted to concentrate on my studies, and found it difficult to concentrate surrounded by London's noise, needed a break from the busyness, needed to sort out my thoughts, which I found difficult to do in London. I have made the most of London over the past twelve years and it was the time to move on, to search for a place where there was no buzz, but peace, time to reflect on my experiences, and simply some order to my life. London was great when I needed inspiration and life experience, it was a great platform for inspiration, for networking, and of course, career development. But there was no need for external world to inspire me anymore, my head craved more freedom and space instead and it was wild nature that I felt could bring me more inspiration then megapolis. I was not enjoying any of the city’s pleasures, I have been to many galleries, gigs, concerts, theatre performances and it was not something I was enjoying anymore. I was not enjoying acquiring new relationships every week without anyone wanting to keep their relationships going, I didn’t enjoy feeling that only reasons people would find me interesting and would invite me to their fancy parties only because they found me ‘useful’ in their career climbings. I wanted some more honesty and slower pace of life, where I would have time to work on my projects and concentrate on things that were more meaningful in life.

I was always fascinated by how different Scandinavia is from the rest of the world, colder temperatures also looked attractive to me, as I, being born in Russian Saint-Petersburg, represented a proper northerner. It was also my personal interest in a social political system that Scandinavian countries shared and I was hoping that coming to Denmark to study would help me understand its culture and its people better. I was lucky enough to meet a few Danes before coming to Denmark who were genuinely good people with characteristics I always respected in people, polite, rational, calm, honest and direct.

I have also heard about ‘Danish happiness’ which I thought was more about people themselves and how they saw things rather then about Danish greatness as a country. Danes just know how to appreciate what they have, accept things as they are and feel satisfied with them. My rather confused self craved that sense of order and peace they had in their communities.

They were educational statistics that I was very much impressed with and high rankings in students’ satisfaction. Programs were well designed and were very much personalized. It seemed Danish Universities were interested in educating its students to the highest level and cared about students do well in the future. I have never had this feeling in England, especially while studying in London. In London I thought it was much more materialized, it was more about appearances and self-marketing rather then real knowledge. English professors were very much preoccupied with their own research, they hardly had any time for their students, and of course not for any personal contact with them. Maybe it was just my personal unlucky experience with my particular degree, but that is how I saw things and that is why I did not want to carry on with my future development in England.  

And so the decision was made to come to Aalborg as they had a multi-disciplinary Masters degree that I thought could help me to narrow down my interests and help me choose my future path. It is a great experience I must say, I am learning new things every day, not just from my lectures, but from people around me, from Scandinavian culture, nature and air. I could not be any happier. Sometimes I wonder when I am going to start missing the buzz.. Can’t get enough of that peace, quietness and space.


Check Scandinavian Wanderings for more posts 

Plato on Internet and illusions

- Next then, I said… Picture people as dwelling in a cavernous underground chamber, with the entrance opening upward to the light, and a long passage-way running down the whole length of the cave. They have been there since childhood, legs and necks fettered so they cannot move: they see only what is in front of them, unable to turn their heads because of the bonds.

- A strange image, he said, and strange prisoners.

- Like ourselves, I replied.

Plato, The Republic, 514A

In plato’s cave, nobody sees what’s really happening. They think they do, but they don’t. Plato says we are like the cave dwellers. We think we see the Truth, but we don’t. The difference is that we can see the Truth is we know how. Plato knew how and wanted to show us. But Plato also knew that we – or at least most of us – are either incapable of or uninterested in coming to grips with the Truth. Philosophers have the way and the will, but the rest of humanity doesn’t. we are quite happy living in our pleasant illusions, far removed from the Truth. This is why we build the imaginary worlds – dramas – that Plato found so disturbing. For what are storytelling, literature, and theater but attempts to escape from reality into some fantasy? The storytellers, writers, and thespians all say we can learn something about ourselves from their productions. But what do we learn, really, if all that is depicted is fiction? Fiction cannot be the Truth, for it is the opposite of the Truth. And even those productions that claim to be something other than fiction – histories and the like – aren’t they simply poor reflections of a reality that is gone and cannot be revisited, and therefore really fictions themselves?

Perhaps they are, and perhaps they aren’t. In any case, Plato was on firm ground in asserting that we naturally see the comfort of illusions. 

HESSE

Goodbye, small farmhouse and my native country. I leave you as a young man leaves his mother: he knows it is time for him to leave her, and he knows, too, he can never leave her completely, even though he wants to.

SMALL TOWN

Here the true life of wandering begins, the life I love, wandering without any specific direction, taking it easy in sunlight, the life of a vagabond wholly free.

We wanderers are very much cunning - we develop those feelings which are impossible to fulfill; and the love which actually should belong to a woman, we lightly scatter among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies. We separate love from its object, love alone is enough for us, in the same way that, in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.

RECTORY

I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if something I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.

Hermann Hesse

I just cannot get enough of him.. his mind is like mine.. for the first time in my life there is that feeling that someone might understand, might have same thoughts, feelings as myself. Deep down there, there is that desire to see it as a sign, as myself finally moving in the direction, making the right decisions towards finding the Self and maybe finding that happiness that all philosophers and thinkers seem to be talking about, and peace.

This is one of my favorite poems of his: beautiful, sensual and very close to my heart

Rain (from Wandering 'Farm')

Soft rain, summer rain
Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees,
Oh, how lovely and full of blessing
To dream and be satisfied.

I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be lead elsewhere.

I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.

Heart, how torn are you,
How blessed to plow down blindly,
To think nothing, to know nothing,
Only to breathe, only to feel.

Two extracts from "Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought"

p.89. " The difficulty, however, says Kierkegaard, is that the wanderer, who has only accidentally come upon the quiet place, feels he is surrounded by a nature that does not understand him 'even though it always seems as f an understanding must be arrived at'. Therefore he says, the wanderer can see the stars, but the stars cannot see him, 'thus there is no agreement between him and the stars.' With the person who confesses, however, things are different: 'the environment knows well enough what that stillness means and that is asks for earnestness. It knows that it is its wish to be understood' (p.26 original text)

p.90 " For Dogen, our suffering stems not so much from the nature of existence as from a false perception of existence. That is, it stems from delusion. This delusional awareness then leads us to form attachments to non-existent or misconstrued objects, including the idea of an unchanging self, and ties us into a cycle of suffering when the world does not fit with our misperceptions and attachments. The way out of this cycle is to see through one's delusions and thus break these attachments.
This much of Dogen's thought is supported by the core of the Buddha's philosophy [...] Selfish desire is based on the delusion of a persisting self, which in turn leads to attachments to things which one misperceives as one's own or as having the potential for being one's own. The way out of this problem is to give up selfish desire."

PROVOCATIONS - Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

Reading Provocations now- it is the book that is helping to find the true self, discover something that was always there, but was lost for a while somehow.. a possibility of the crazy city life? no, we are not blaming anyone and anything, it was purely out of our own weaknesses.. but now the time for the recovery has come.

While living in London, one day there comes the time for realization of how many are losing themselves in their own world of dreams, trying to be someone else - pity they do not realize how silly they look sometimes from an outsider's perspective. It is rather sad that most of them will never come to realization and will never have a chance to uncover the true self as they will always be too preoccupied with material and simplistic living. Well if you are one of them, and do not afraid to acknowledge that, maybe this chapter will lead you in the right direction. It definitely helped me.

As it was noticed by a good friend of mine the other day, it is enough to be loved and supported by just one other person, to feel that strength and peace inside of yourself. But this other person has to love the true you.

The Despair of Weakness
If you would like to read the book please download it here

The despair of weakness is the despair of not wanting to be oneself. This kind of despair amounts to a passivity of the self. Its frame of reference is the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are good fortune, misfortune, and fate. What is immediate is all that matters. The determining factor is what happens or does not happen to oneself. To despair is to lose the eternal, but of this loss the one who despairs in weakness says nothing, it doesn’t even occur to him. He is too preoccupied with securing his earthly existence against unnecessary deprivation. To lose the earthly, however, is not in itself to despair, yet that is precisely what this person speaks of and calls despair. What he says is in a sense true, only not in the way he understands it. He is turned around and what he says must be understood backwards. In other words, he stands there pointing to something that is not despair (e.g. a loss of some kind), explaining that he is in despair, and yes, sure enough, the despair is going on behind him but unawares.

Therefore, if everything suddenly changes, once his external circumstances change and his wishes are fulfilled, then happiness returns to him, he begins life afresh. When help comes from outside, happiness is restored to him, and he begins where he left off. Yet he neither was nor becomes a self. He is a cipher and simply carries on living merely on the level of what is immediate and of what is happening around him. This form of despair consists of not wanting to be a self, really. Actually, it consists of wanting desperately to be someone else.

Such a self refuses to take responsibility. Life is but a game of chance. Hence, in the moment of despair, when no help comes, such a person wants desperately to become someone else. And yet a despairer of this kind, whose only wish is this craziest of all crazy transformations – to be someone else – is in love with the fancy that the change can be made as easily as one puts on another coat. Or to put it differently, he only knows himself by his coat. He simply doesn’t know himself. He knows what it is to have a self only in externals. There could hardly be a more absurd confusion, for a self differs precisely, no, infinitely, from those externals.

And what if such a person was able to become somebody else, could put on a new self? There is the story of a peasant who had come barefoot to town but who made enough money to buy himself a pair of stockings and shoes and still have enough left over to get himself drunk. On his way home in his drunken state he lay down in the middle of the road and fell asleep. A carriage came along, and the coachman shouted to him to move aside or else he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked down at his legs and, not recognizing them because of the stockings and shoes, said: “Go ahead, they aren’t my legs.” So it is with the immediate person who despairs in weakness of being a true self. It is impossible to draw a picture of him that is not comic.