‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
In the wake of the Pope’s retirement, we have a brief interlude where no human being is claiming infallibility outside of North Korea and psychiatric institutions.
I saw this in Third Way’s regular ‘Agnostics Anonymous’ column. And yes, as the reference to the Pope indicates, I am still behind in my reading. This quote is from the April 2013 issue.
A meal is supposed to be a place where you can laugh, even if you get a chunk of food in your face when someone spits on you!
Thus Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, in which people with and without intellectual disabilities experience life together as fellow human beings. The quote is from an article entitled ‘The Fragility of L’Arche and the Friendship of God’, which can be found in Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.
Things are as big as you make them –
I can fill a whole body,
a whole day of life
with worry
on one scrap of paper;
yet, the same evening,
looking up,
can frame my fingers
to fit the sky
in my cupped hands.
Lucy Partington, whose remains were among those discovered in the basement of Fred and Rosemary West. The quote is from Marian Partington, If You Sit Very Still.
Having looked forward to Alain de Botton’s book On Love, I did not find this as inspiring as I had hoped at first. However, now, half-way through, I have to say that the book is growing on me. Thus far, the chapter entitled ‘“I”-Confirmation’ has easily been the highlight. Consider, for instance, the following reflections on labeling:
the labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us.
De Botton speaks about ‘shaping according to preconceptions’, adding that:
Children are always described from a third-person perspective … before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood. Most people get us wrong, either out of neglect or prejudice. Even being loved implies a gross bias – a pleasant distortion, but a distortion nevertheless. … No eye can wholly contain our ‘I.’ We will always be chopped off in some area or other, fatally or not.
Looking at it from the other perspective, he notes:
Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe’s nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand.
To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern, to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying.
Once again from Alain de Botton, On Love
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain de Botton, On Love
Karl Möller 