Mortality - II

"This inner echo of a home or a paradise forever lost to us - as a constitutive part of our "I" - defines the extent of what we are destined to lack and what we therefore cannot help but reach toward: for does not the hunger for meaning, for an answer to the question of what - in the process of becoming ourselves - we have become, derive from the recollection of a separated being for its state of primordial being in Being?  From the other side, the alien world into which we are thrown beckons to us and tempts us.  On the one hand we are constantly exposed to the temptation to stop asking questions and to adapt ourselves to the world as it presents itself to us, to sink into it, to forget ourselves in it, to lie our way out of ourselves and our 'otherness' and thus to simplify our existence-in-the-world.  At the same time we are persuaded over and over again that we can only reach toward meaning within the dimensions of this world, as it lies before us, by being open to the opening out of meaning within the world."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's sentence on temptation brings to my mind a passage from Emerson that has been haunting me of late.  The passage is from his essay, History -

"...near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events! In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him."