Missing connection

paolo · Phoenix Joined: Aug 13, 2006 Posts: 1166 Location: Italy

There are people who do things with instinctive moral passion. If they do them only out of conformity they are not alive, they are dead logs running afloat the river. That’s what T.S.Eliot and Dante meant when they talked about people who could never take sides and people walking on the London Bridge (I had not thought death had undone so many). Instinct is our relationship with Life, obeying instinct is obeying Life, and being alive. That’s against the (declining) rationalist, technical, scientistic climate of our epoch. To communicate with animals is a way to drink at the sources of life. Our more valuable passions, maternal love, affection for kin and companions, abhorrence for cruelty and sadism, are connected with animal, instinctual life. There is no shortcut way to this salvation of the kind “it’s enough to get a pet and we are safe”. We are faced with difficult riddles anyways. We have gone very far from allegiance to “primary life” as Nietzsche, and post-Nietzsche philosophy would have it. And in any case we are not dealing with a movement or a revolution to be embraced and implemented. I see it as a labyrinthine path full of pitfalls and strenuous efforts to get rid of all the civilized ways of living and of thinking, a path to be pursued in some kind of minimalist intimacy and to appropriate again some crumbs of a meaningful life, to reach the missing connection.
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
--Samuel Beckett