experience and reason

Jan 18, 2008 15:37


"Our experience is composed rather of illusions lost than wisdom acquired."

Read that lil bit from Joseph Roux earlier, and it helped me get to a point, which is- I hope to blog more this year. I hadn't done much lately. Most of the time, I feel stagnant... or dumb. I didn't feel like I had much to add to the conversation. Some of the time, I enjoyed a good book/ film/ album, but didn't blog about it because, well, I'm always getting into one that folks have never heard of nor will ever see around their parts.
I still feel like charting an upswing in acquisition of wisdom- which is to say, I hope to get into reading more nonfiction, more book reviews, seeing more quality films and documentaries, and writing about it in here. That's not a new year's resolution!... although yeah, it sounds a hell of a lot like one. Aside from "bettering myself," though, I just want to make myself (and my blog) a little less boring.

I do like that quote. It reminds me of a couple things, most directly the old quote by Dizzy Gillespie. I forget the exact line, but he said he spent the first 30 years playing the trumpet learning what to play, and the remainder of his career learning when not to play. Keith Richards said something similar- said he'd spent the first few decades concentrating on the rock, and now he was trying to perfect the roll.
So the main idea of the day is- don't worry too much about getting new information, but using that which you already have correctly. Don't worry about amazing new insights, but use the experience you already have to show you what you've got going on in your life that needs to be dumped out of it.

You might be wondering who Joseph Roux is; I do, too. I just did a quick net search that didn't turn up more than he was a poet, I guess. I did see some more quotes, including this one:

"Reason guides but a small part of man, and the rest obeys feeling, true or false, and passion, good or bad."

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