Saturday, July 05, 2008

what ships are for



". . .nihilistic pessimism and rationalistic optimism fail in their effort to juggle away the bitter truth of sacrifice: they also eliminate all reasons for wanting it. Someone told a young invalid who wept because she had to leave her home, her occupations, and her whole past life, "Get cured. The rest has no importance." "But if nothing has any importance," she answered, "what good is it to get cured?"

She was right. In order for this world to have any importance, in order for our undertaking to have a meaning and to be worthy of sacrifices, we must affirm the concrete and particular thickness of this world and the individual reality of our projects and ourselves. This is what democratic societies understand. . . "

-Simone De Beauvoir


I think I'll be taking a couple dance classes this fall. . along with the chemistry, computer programming. . . maybe physics. Maybe technical writing or rhetoric. It's funny how much of life is about figuring out which cliffs we respectively need to jump off of.