mccarthyism

::Saturday, October 6::

In the morning I sit with three old men at the train station waiting for the early train to the city, the town very quiet and still on a Saturday and the light coming in the train station windows. I am going to take the GRE. The men are Mexicans and speak no English but they smile happily at me and talk unhurriedly to each other. They do not seem to be there for any train.

The city is oddly quiet as well, late to rise on a weekend morning, and I walk down wide and mostly empty streets in cold morning wind. The city never sleeps but sometimes it lazes around for a while. When I emerge from my building some hours later it is still muted, and gray overhead and I feel like I’ve missed the whole day, or else it still hasn’t started, and won’t until I leave.

::Monday, September 3::

Reading “The Habit of Being” I come across this passage. “Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferent to getting slain in the duel… You do not write the best you can for the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit. Resignation to the will of God does not mean that you stop resisting evil or obstacles, it means that you leave the outcome out of your personal considerations. It is the most concern coupled with the least concern.” It’s this disregard for the outcome which I think comes closest to describing what faith looks like in daily life. She calls it “resignation to the will of God,” which I think is good and true. Instead, we grasp and scheme on the assumption that we are really somehow in control of what happens. It’s analogous to utilitarianism, since it’s based on an underlying hubris that says we are in a position to know what ought to happen…

But what I really like is the “returning your talent increased to the invisible God.” Like in the parable. When I'm concerned with how my talent compares to others’, I'm grasping and discontent. It’s utilitarianism. Instead I ought to work more faithfully to increase it. Whether I have two or five.

I finish the index, anticlimactically, and an epoch peters to an end. Or will on Tuesday when I have my exit interview. We take Aiden to the park and have a picnic in the shade at the edge of a wide field. These kinds of things are beautiful especially in retrospect.

Listening to Beethoven’s A minor quartet and reading. A long, quiet evening.

posted by ethan # 10/14/2012 02:28:00 AM

mccarthyism

10.14.2012

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