When you close your ears to the chatter, your eyes to the flashing lights, and your mind to the world's distractions and diversions, what do you
want? What are your deepest wishes and desires? What is your greatest hope?
Please, delve deep and post your thoughts. And cite your inspiration if there is one. ...I wrote my bit after thinking about the phrase "lives of
quiet desperation," a phrase I misremembered as T.S. Eliott's, from "Hollow Men"...
In the end, I want to have lived a great life. I am not interested in the safety of quiet desperation. I want to soar. Not just above the mundane, but
to the place at the edge of the universe where stars are born. I want to breathe air from the beginning of time, to inhale love's infinity. And yes,
I will risk annihilation to feed my hunger.
My greed is not the greed of ordinary hollow men. Greedy men fear their own mortality. They try to wall out death by building barricades of material
comfort, insulating themselves with social pretense and cultural vacuity, isolating themselves from the stuff of life. Of course they know such safety
is deficient and unreliable, neither complete nor immortal. Hence the desperation. But the drive to immortality reigns imperative, albeit
misdirected.
Me, I do not fear such death. I know death is required for rebirth, that rebirth is fundamental to a great life. That a great life is a stepping stone
to conscious immortality. Like Siddhartha, I will embrace death and reincarnation here and now, over and over, until I get it right. And if I don't,
at least I will have tried.
...Looks like my path really is that of the contemplative. Whether I have chosen it or it has chosen me, no matter. I am happy enough alone in my own
body. But contemplation neither precludes physical love nor mandates celibacy. So the question is: Am I meant to stay alone in this life, breathing
only my own breath, waiting for the final oneness of divine singularity? Or will I taste the promise better on my tongue before I die?
*****
I thought the "lives of quiet desperation" phrase came from Eliott's "Hollow Men." Wrong. Turns out it's a Thoreau quote.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
- Henry David Thoreau
According to Wikipedia, the above may be a common misquote; Thoreau's actual words in Walden are:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
- Walden (1854)
But Eliott's "Hollow Men" is good too.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
-TS Eliott
-sofi