How can a stuffy-looking man who lived in the nineteenth century reach out and touch me so? I'm moving into the third day of a snowed-in week-end and very much at peace (thanks to Snow Patrol and some really good herbs!) but still it can get a little lonely when you live by yourself and the apartment building is eerily empty...even out in the parking lot where I thought more people would be digging out their cars.
So many things John Stuart Mill writes in his Autobiography speak to me or the me that had lost her love for books until this very week-end:
.:...In vain I sought relief from my favorite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my love of mankind , and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out...
We all have gone through periods of empty sadness, where it's hard to want to do anything, much less read. But whether it's depression or not is another matter and one I never really thought of as applying to any time before the 20th century, though of course why wouldn't it have?
Mill also writes: My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.
Funny how, except for some of the modern music I like and my strong belief in social and civil rights issues, I would much prefer to live in an earlier time when thinking and living could be done in quieter times and self-reflection was entirely possible.
I would give almost anything for a world without cellphones and other obnoxious noises. Occasionally I feel so out of time here...
But since I DO live in this century and certainly don't hate living here I love taking advantage of the easy access to all the great classics I love. One cause (I think) of my inability to read much over the past year was my conviction that everything I read was so blatantly false. I could not be tricked into forgetting that fiction was fiction.
Mill also wrote some wonderfully fitting things in _On Liberty_:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.
On Calvinist Theory (oh how I detest Calvinism):
It is so, on the Calvinistic theory. According to that, the one great offense of man is self-will. All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised of obedience. You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise: 'whatever is not duty is sin.'
The thought of living under the thumb of a set of pre-determined guidelines terrifies me...Hell sounds so much better than any place where you have no control over your own actions and life.
It's weird: my mind has been mush and mellow lately, but it has also yearned for deeper meaning and maybe that's what I want to finally read again.
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