Six months since we've seen each other. Too long to not talk with a good friend.
We really began with a book entitled Little Children. He described it as about parents in their 30's and, yes, saddening.
"What kind of sadness? What was the lament?"
"Well, it's sort of like Chekhov, simply factual. That's the way it is."
"Chekhov is a wuss. Unrequited whatever. 'It' never happened. I never got what I wanted."
"As a generation, we are a pathetic group of cowards. We have gotten so many great things - education, sympathetic and caring parents, general peace. But we also got this horrible ambiguity, a lack of mooring posts, moral reference points. And so we are equipted, able, perceptive, and yet totally adrift when it comes to real courage. Maybe as a result we are profoundly unmotivated."
We talked about a story of a woman who discovered that there was a need to provide shoes to a group of impoverished children. She began soliciting people and then collecting them in her garage. The idea swelled and now she is looking for warehouse space to house the donations.
Both of us agreed there was something remarkable. Part of it was her automatic action. It wasn't a plan, it was more like a muscle. She had to do it, it was who she is. There is a purity in that and we have an admiration for be who do what they are, especially if it is generous.
That's the other part: in the service of others. The nobility of an act that is entirely for their benefit. As naturally selfish creatures, we have an fascination with people who natually tend towards generousity.
So what about us? We see a certain heroism and yet we want it to almost 'happen' to us. Don't you, God or imagination or courage, recognize the desire to do good? Why don't you pick me to emerge, tap my shoulder as a chosen one?
"I'm lazy. I know all this and yet I still do what I do."
Whatever you want to call it, the thing degrades into an unbearable irony. And that whacked tone is that of our generation. One of the impacts is that we have lost our teleological (toward some end) sense entirely -- unlike our recent ancestors who believed in progress, a destiny and human goal. We, in fact, very recently have lost complete faith in technology to not deliver more liability than the benefit or any other human design to accomplish anything over the longhaul. We're not intending (nor is anything else intending) towards anything. That is a phenominal shift.
Back to Chekhov, David was right. Here is a quote that sum it up brilliantly:
Chekhov belonged to the age which followed the heroic generation of Tolstoy and Dostoevski. At times his characters live, or think that they live, in the world of his predecessors. One is tempted to say that they all seem to have read Tolstoy and Dostoevski and are trying to be Tolstoy and Dostoevski characters. But Chekhov has lost the passion of his predessors because he has lost the faith which sustains it. He and often his characters are skeptics rather than believers. The soul searchings of his personages are not terrible but, frequently, ridiculous, and it is their futility rather than their tragedy which most impresses him. Whereas Tolstoy and Dostoevski were prophets, he is a critic and a satirist. They believed; he doubts. They saw tragedy; he sees, at most, pathos, usually tinged with absurdity.
So our lack of courage is what bothers me. We far more pathetic and need to inspire each other towards possibility. In the word of 1001 Arabia nights, the purpose of it all is to cultivate enthusiasm.
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