The Republic of Heaven
So, after some discussion about religion the other night, media_res told me I should read The Republic of Heaven. So I did.
I got to about this line: "And one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of God is this sense of meaningless or alienation that so many of us have felt in the past century or so." At this point, I had a few lightbulbs go off, and I was definitely interested. I'd never thought of the death of God in this way, as something that affected how I felt about the world, or really in any context outside of Nietzsche. It occurred to me at this point that this is what's happened to me over the last few years. The trouble has been that God didn't die instantly in a tragic accident; he's been slowly dying for years now, and letting go has been really hard because without God, I have been at a complete loss as to how I should connect with the world.
This quote's here because it's good writing advice: "In the republic, stockings work differently. They're real stockings; they sometimes have holes in them. That little white hole beside her ankle is one of the things that make Victoria "quite plain, but unearthly beautiful"; and of course Paul can't give too much attention to her stockings, and her shoes, and her coat, and everything about her. She is real, and he is in love. "
This might be one of the better expressed reasons that fantasy is troubling, especially in its excessive popularity these days, and why tricolora makes me so ridiculously happy: "As Goldthwaite points out, such fantasy is both escapist and solipsistic: seeking to flee the complexities and compromises of the real world for somewhere nobler altogether, lit by a light that never was on sea or land, it inevitably finds itself enclosed in a mental space that is smaller, barer, and poorer than reality, because it's sustained by an imagination that strains against the world instead of working with it, refusing and not accepting."
These two just rocked my socks: "In the republic, we're connected in a moral way to one another, to other human beings. We have responsibilities to them, and they to us. We're not isolated units of self-interest in a world where there is no such thing as society; we cannot live so."
&
"[The Republic of Heaven] enables us to see this real world, our world, as a place of infinite delight, so intensely beautiful and intoxicating that if we saw it clearly then we would want nothing more, ever."
Anyway, thanks Emma. :) That was awesome!
I got to about this line: "And one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of God is this sense of meaningless or alienation that so many of us have felt in the past century or so." At this point, I had a few lightbulbs go off, and I was definitely interested. I'd never thought of the death of God in this way, as something that affected how I felt about the world, or really in any context outside of Nietzsche. It occurred to me at this point that this is what's happened to me over the last few years. The trouble has been that God didn't die instantly in a tragic accident; he's been slowly dying for years now, and letting go has been really hard because without God, I have been at a complete loss as to how I should connect with the world.
This quote's here because it's good writing advice: "In the republic, stockings work differently. They're real stockings; they sometimes have holes in them. That little white hole beside her ankle is one of the things that make Victoria "quite plain, but unearthly beautiful"; and of course Paul can't give too much attention to her stockings, and her shoes, and her coat, and everything about her. She is real, and he is in love. "
This might be one of the better expressed reasons that fantasy is troubling, especially in its excessive popularity these days, and why tricolora makes me so ridiculously happy: "As Goldthwaite points out, such fantasy is both escapist and solipsistic: seeking to flee the complexities and compromises of the real world for somewhere nobler altogether, lit by a light that never was on sea or land, it inevitably finds itself enclosed in a mental space that is smaller, barer, and poorer than reality, because it's sustained by an imagination that strains against the world instead of working with it, refusing and not accepting."
These two just rocked my socks: "In the republic, we're connected in a moral way to one another, to other human beings. We have responsibilities to them, and they to us. We're not isolated units of self-interest in a world where there is no such thing as society; we cannot live so."
&
"[The Republic of Heaven] enables us to see this real world, our world, as a place of infinite delight, so intensely beautiful and intoxicating that if we saw it clearly then we would want nothing more, ever."
Anyway, thanks Emma. :) That was awesome!