When Toni Morrison said the grandeur of life is the attempt, not the solution… And how she went on to explain that it’s about behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances. The power that has, you know? It’s really just the making room for what breathes in the presence of the attempt. In the coming-to-be.
This is the one.
Q: How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?“
Ms. Morrison: Ummm, how do you survive whole–I can’t do this quickly, for one–how can you survive whole and when we’re victims of something, um. You know that’s a nice fat, eastern/western philosophical question about ‘how do you get through’?
Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt, it’s not about that solution.
It is about being as fearless as one can, behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that, that makes it elegant. Good is more interesting. More complex, more demanding.
Evil is silly. It may be horrible but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea: it’s predictable, it needs a tuxedo, it needs blood, it needs fingernails, it’s all that costume, in order to get anybody’s attention.
But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually, if not spiritually and they certainly are spiritually. This is more fascinating job.
We are already born. We are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”
