This is Not A Pipe

So I'm stuck at home waiting for the fabulous French Labor Department to do their job and finish sending me my paperwork. I'm wondering how much of the effort it took to get this internship and how much of the effort it will take to survive for five months on below minimum wage has actually been worth it. More importantly, I'm worried that I may not have the necessary wisdom to know when to stop pushing and find a Plan B. How much of my stubborn refusal to give up on this or the South Africa/Rwanda project, is actual belief/courage and how much of it is simply blind stupidity? I guess I'll know after the risk is taken.

Carly is setting off for Senegal today, to work with a great organization called Tostan. After I saw her yesterday, a quote by Henry James popped up, "Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."

I noticed that James says goodness is weak and felt enraged. Weak why, because it is tempted, distracted away, torn by force? For me, goodness is what I see in friends who set out to the ends of the earth armed only with dreams, hopes, and passions, in people who turn the basest human drives into constructive energy, in what reflects in the eyes of the faithful, in the resistance against one's personal vices and the vices that consume the world. Goodness is not a frail, submissive ally of truth; it’s an ardent warrior! I see goodness as neither abstract nor passive, I see it everywhere, fighting in small, barely-noticeable ways to grab permanently onto the human soul. And if it wavers in this fight, it is from exhaustion, not weakness. Perhaps my definition has become too broad over the past several months, weathered a bit by pain and touched by growth, but I'd rather have a simpler [in the good way], more inclusive criteria than a selective, high-brow categorical breakdown. Then again, I also clearly lack all of the answers, as is evidenced by the title and my partial agreement with Magritte that, no matter how hard you may try to portray something in painting or in writing, you will never fully succeed in defining the real thing. It's always going to be an inferior, grayer version, much like my definition of goodness pales in comparison with goodness itself, whatever it may be. One of my favorite quotes from George Santayana comes to mind, but I've already quoted once so I'll restrain myself.

I was cleaning [not a surprise] part of my closet several days ago and found an article I had written in high school for our Yellow Press magazine. Despite its exaggerated language, bothersome didactic tone, somewhat cliché phrasing, and bad philosophical simplification for which Thomas Paine would surely have smacked me upside the head, I found myself smiling. The piece was about students not paying attention to the world around them, or the news, or human suffering [very original, yes I know]. The concluding paragraph was as follows:

"Anyone who lives submerged in the endless repetition of the hours, the minutes, consumed by the innate knowledge of this emptiness, and finding neither a way to differentiate between the days nor to unite and mold them into a worthy and sequential series, is devoid of the emotion, desire, and passion that make up the pulp of life. “Carpe Diem!” I feel like screaming. Follow a life, any life, every life. Question like Socrates, or with truths, statements, actions. Existences should not disintegrate to complete monotony and unawareness of the outside world, to supine ingestion of our media’s mindless and biased drivel, for when the time does come for death, we should hope to waste away surrounded by almost anything but the overpowering, hollow ring of an empty room and a life brimming with forsaken thoughts."

In some ways it's simultaneously sad and wonderful to see the things that have changed since I was 17. But in more ways it's great to be reminded of the things that have circled around and risen up again.