This, then, is where people come to live; I'd have thought it more of a place to die.
The child was asleep, its mouth hung open, it was breathing in iodoform, pommes frites, fear. That was simply the way it was. The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.
A dog barks. What relief: a dog.
Why should I inform anyone of the changes within me? If I am changing, I no longer remain the person I was, and if I become someone else, it follows that I have no friends or acquaintances. And to write strangers, to people who do not know me, is quite out of the question.
Have I mentioned already that I am learning to see? Yes, I am making a start. I have not made much progress yet, but I mean to the most of my time.
To think, for example, that I have never consciously registered how many faces there are. There are a great number of people, but there are a great many more faces, for every person has several. There are several people who wear the same face for years on end; naturally it shows signs of wear, it gets dirty, it cracks at the creases, it splays out like gloves worn on a journey. These are simple people, practicising economies, and they do not change their face or even have it cleaned. It'll do fine, they insist, and who is to prove then wrong? The question, of course, since they have several faces, is what they do with the others. They keep them for best: their children can wear them some day. But it has been known for their dogs to go out wearing them, too. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people are disconcertingly quick to change their faces, one after another, and they wear them out. At first suppose they have enough to last for ever, but hardly have they reached forty when they come to the last of them. There is of course a tragic side to this. They are not used to looking after their faces; the last is worn out in a week, holed and paper-thing in numerous places, and little by little the underlay shows through, the non-face, and they go about wearing that.
But the woman, that woman: she was wholly immersed withing herself, bowed forward, head in hands. It was at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The moment I saw her, I began to tread softly. The poor should not be disturbed when they are lost in thought. The thing they are trying to think of may yet come to them.
The street was too deserted, its emptiness was wearied with itself and pulled out the footfall from under my feet and banged it about as if it were knocking a wooden clog. The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.
Who cares about a well-made death these days? No one. Even the rich, who could afford to die in well-appointed style, are lowering their standards and growing indifferent; the wish for a death of one's own is becoming ever more infrequent. (skip) along we come and find a life ready to wear on the rail, and all we have to do is put it on. (skip) You die as you happen to die; you die the death that comes with your illness
Is it possible, it thinks, that we have neither seen nor perceived nor said anything real or of any importance yet? Is it possible that we have had thousand of years to look, ponder and record, and that we have let those thousands of years pass like a break at school, when one eats a sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that despite our inventions and progresses, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.
Yes, it is possible.
(skip)
Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is winding down, connected to nothing at all, like a clock in an empty room - ?
Yes, it is possible.
(skip)
Anyone - anyone who has had this disquieting thoughts - (skip) This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself, five flights up, and write, day and night: yes, that is what it will come to - he will have to write.
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. (skip) They give me one look and they know. They know that really I am one of them, and am only play-acting a little. (skip) For it is clear to me that untouchables is what they are, not mere beggars; no, they really are not beggars, one must make distinctions. They are human refuse, the husks of men, spat out by fate. Moist with the spittle of fate, they cling to a wall, a lamp-post, a Morris column, or they dribble slowly down the street, leaving a dark, dirty trail behind them. What on earth did that old woman want of me, who had crept out of some hole carrying a bedside-table drawer with a few buttons and needles rolling about in it? Why did she keep walking at my side, watching me?
(skip) and then I am among these books, beyond your reach as though I were dead, and sit here reading a poet.
There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-covered leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written. I would have written a great deal, for I would have had a great many thoughts and memories of a great many people.
But things turned out differently, (skip) as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.
a viscous tide of humanity flowed towards me. (skip) the laughter oozed from their mouth like pus from open wounds. (skip) I felt I ought to laugh as well but I couldn't. (skip) the truth of it was that they were moving and I never budged an inch.
They don't allow the dying in. (skip) It was his immobility I sensed, and all of sudden I knew what it meant. A link had been forged between us, and I realized that he was rigid with terror. (skip) his withdrawal from everything: not only from humankind. One moment more and all of it would have lost its meaning,
I was one of the untouchables; (skip) a hand that was no longer a hand now lay; (skip) It was some immense, immovable mass, with a face and a large, heavy, inert hand.
Now it was there. Now it was growing from within me like a tumour, like a second head, and it was part of me, though it surely could not be mine, since it was too big.
And with whatever it is that comes back, there rises a whole tangle of muddled memories, clinging to it like wet seaweed on some sunken thing.
the fear that I might betray myself and speak of everything I am afraid of; and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because it is all beyond saying - and the other fears . . . the fears.
I shared the fear with which he sensed them growing and growing, and I saw how he clutched the stick when the spasms began inside him. At those times, the expression of his hands was so severe and relentless that I placed all my hope in his will, which must be a mighty one. But what could the mere will do? The moment must inevitably come when his strength would be exhausted; it could not be a long now. And I, following him with my heart pounding, I gathered what little strength I had, like cash, and, looking at his hands, begged him to take it if he had any need for it.
(skip) Stood. His left hand gently released its grip on the stick and rose, so slowly that I saw it tremble against the air; he pushed his hat back a little and wiped his brow. He turned his head slightly, the water, without taking any of it in, and then he gave in. The stick was gone, he flung wide his arms as if he meant to fly,
(skip) I was drained. Like a blank piece of paper I drifted along, past the houses, back up the boulevard.
if only some of this could be shared. But would it then be, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.
(skip) Your heart is driving you out of yourself, your heart is after you, and you are almost beside yourself and you can't go back. Like a beetle stepped on, you ooze out of yourself, and you little scrap of carapace and adaptability is meaningless.
The trees stood as if they had lost their way in the fog, and there was something presumptuous about driving into it. As we drove, the snow began to fall silently once more, and now it was as if all that remained had been erased and we were driving on to a blank page.
now silence fell. It was as silent as in the aftermath of pain. The silence was strangely palpable and prickling, as if a wound were healing.
That strangely unbounded quality of childhood, the lack of proportions, that refusal of things ever to be quite foreseen, (skip) Essentially this was all still growing apace on me, closing in on every side, and the more I looked out, the more I stirred up what was within me: (skip) It was easy to see that grown-ups were very little troubled by all of this; they went about making their judgements and doing what they did, and, if ever they were in difficulties, it was external circumstances that were to blame.
No matter how often I tried, life gave me to understand that it knew nothing of their existence.
This city is full of people who are slowly slipping down to their level. Most of them resist at first; but then there are those faded, (skip)
Why else do I find it so hard not to follow them when they pass me? Why do I suddenly think up the sweetest words of night, and why does my voice linger, all tenderness between my throat and my heart? Why do I imagine how I would hold them close, right up to my breath, with an inexpressible caution, these dolls whom life has played with, flinging their arms open wide with every spring that comes, for no purpose whatsoever, till their shoulder joints grow loose? (skip) Stray cats are the only ones that come to them in their rooms at evening, and one down a couple of streets. They walk on past the houses, people continually screen them from my view, and they disappear beyond them as if they were merely nothing.
And yet I know that if a man were to try to love them, they would weigh upon him, like people who have been walking too long and simple stop.
But it is night, it is winter, I am freezing, I believe in him. For glory is a mere moment, and we have never seen anything longer lasing than wretchedness.
Ah, ought you to have been dead?
Maybe. Maybe what is new is that we survive it: the year, and love. The blossoms and the fruit are ripe when they fall; animals are aware of their own being, and find each other, and are content with that. But we, who have embarked on the quest for God, we can never accomplish an ending. We keep postponing what our own nature prompts us to, needing even more time. What is one year to us? What are all the years? Even before we have embarked upon God, we are praying to Him: let us get through this night. And then illness. And then love.
At such times, the light burns late in his study. He does not remain bent over the pages always, but often leans back and closes hi eyes to ponder a line he has reread, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
- 아프도록 유려한 문장이 표현해 낸 존재적 슬픔과 공허, 그리고 공감.
되씹어서 읽어도 역시 아름답고 가슴 저릿한, 문장들 사이에 그의 말대로 등을 기대고 의미가 혈관에 퍼지는 것을 저릿 저릿할 정도로 느끼게 되는 그런 책이다.
무슨 말로 표현할 수 있을까? 비가 개이지 않는 회색 하늘 밑 그림자가 길어지는 날, 이 책을 다시 펼쳐 젖은 눈으로 한동안 허공을 한동안 응시하게 되리라는 것 밖에는...
2014년 12월 19일 금요일
2014년 11월 12일 수요일
Gunter Grass의 'The Tin Drum' 중
Yes, it was evil. If only because I stood in dark doorways. For as everyone should know, a doorway is the favorite dwelling place of evil.
Saul became Paul. (skip) but I screamed silently, screamed as perhaps a star screams of a fish deep down in the sea. I screamed first into the frosty night that new snow might fall at last, and then into the glass, the dense glass, the precious glass, the cheap glass, the transparent glass, the partitioning glass, the glass between worlds, the virginal, mystical glass that separated Jan Bronski from the ruby necklace, cutting a hole just right for Jan's glove size, which was well known to me. I mad the cutout fall inward like a trap door, like the gate of heaven or the gate of hell:
(skip)
and found me, Oskar, in the doorway.
revealing an abyss of emptiness which apparently nothing could fill but enormous quantities of fried, boiled, preserved, and smoked fish.
He wished to go down into the pit with Mama and the fetus. And there he wished to remain while the survivors tossed in their handfuls of earth, no, Oskar didn't wish to come up, he wished to sit on the tapering foot end of the coffin, drumming if possible, drumming under the earth, until the sticks rotted out of his hands, until his mama for his sake and he for her sake should rot away, giving their flesh to the earth and its inhabitants; with his very knuckles Oskar would have wished to drum for the fetus, if it had only been possible and allowed.
while Oskar cried from hate and love, which turned to a leaden helplessness but could not die.
Everything about Greff was overdone.
Though I had not forgotten them, I missed none of them.
Against all my better judgement, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness.
As soon as the Onion Cellar had filled up - half-full was regarded as full - Schmuh, the host, donned his shawl. (skip)
The customers - businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, theater and movie people, well-known figures from the sporting world, officials in the provincial and municipal government, in short, a cross section of the world which nowadays calls itself intellectual - came with wives, mistresses, secretaries, interior decorators, and occasional male mistresses, to sit on crates covered with burlap. Until Schmuh put on his golden-yellow onions, the conversation subdued, forced, dispirited. These people wanted to talk, to unburden themselves, but they couldn't seem to get started; despite all their efforts, they left the essential unsaid, talked around it. Yet how eager they were to spill their guts, to talk from their hearts, their bowels, their entrails, to forget about their brains just this once, to lay bare the raw, unvarnished truth, the man within. (skip)
The Onion Cellar had its specialty: onions. And moreover, the onion, the cut onion, when you look at it closely. . . but enough of that, Schmuh's guests had stopped looking, they could see nothing more, because their eyes were running over and not because their hearts were so full; for it is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow, some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century. (skip) what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It mad them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. (skip)
After this cataclysm at twelve marks eighty, human beings who have had a good cry open their mouths to speak. Still hesitant, startled by their nakedness of their own words, the weepers poured out their hearts to their neighbors on the uncomfortable, burlap-covered crates, submitted to questioning, let themselves to turned inside-out like overcoats.
my poor mama, the foolish and lovable Jan Bronski, and Matzerath, the cook who knew how to transform feelings into soups? All of them needed to be wept for.
- 대학시절 그저 난잡한 책이라고 만 느껴졌던 때와는 다르게 작년 11월부터 읽기 시작해 중간중간 책의 무게가 너무 무거워 쉬어가며 읽은 책. 자라지 못하는 몸을 가진 오스카의 말로 형언해내기 어려운 생각과 그의 행동 속에 표현되지지 못한 우리자신의, 사회의, 시대의 추한 모습을 보는 듯하여 소름이 돋았다. 유리를 깨는 그의 목청과 미친듯한 드럼의 소리로 시대에 무기력한 인간의 절규를 표현해 낸 듯 하다. 그의 obscene한 생각과 행동들이 무척이나 쓸쓸하고 슬픈 것은 Gunter Grass의 천재적인 표현에 의해서만 가능한 듯.
Saul became Paul. (skip) but I screamed silently, screamed as perhaps a star screams of a fish deep down in the sea. I screamed first into the frosty night that new snow might fall at last, and then into the glass, the dense glass, the precious glass, the cheap glass, the transparent glass, the partitioning glass, the glass between worlds, the virginal, mystical glass that separated Jan Bronski from the ruby necklace, cutting a hole just right for Jan's glove size, which was well known to me. I mad the cutout fall inward like a trap door, like the gate of heaven or the gate of hell:
(skip)
and found me, Oskar, in the doorway.
revealing an abyss of emptiness which apparently nothing could fill but enormous quantities of fried, boiled, preserved, and smoked fish.
He wished to go down into the pit with Mama and the fetus. And there he wished to remain while the survivors tossed in their handfuls of earth, no, Oskar didn't wish to come up, he wished to sit on the tapering foot end of the coffin, drumming if possible, drumming under the earth, until the sticks rotted out of his hands, until his mama for his sake and he for her sake should rot away, giving their flesh to the earth and its inhabitants; with his very knuckles Oskar would have wished to drum for the fetus, if it had only been possible and allowed.
while Oskar cried from hate and love, which turned to a leaden helplessness but could not die.
Everything about Greff was overdone.
Though I had not forgotten them, I missed none of them.
Against all my better judgement, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness.
As soon as the Onion Cellar had filled up - half-full was regarded as full - Schmuh, the host, donned his shawl. (skip)
The customers - businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, theater and movie people, well-known figures from the sporting world, officials in the provincial and municipal government, in short, a cross section of the world which nowadays calls itself intellectual - came with wives, mistresses, secretaries, interior decorators, and occasional male mistresses, to sit on crates covered with burlap. Until Schmuh put on his golden-yellow onions, the conversation subdued, forced, dispirited. These people wanted to talk, to unburden themselves, but they couldn't seem to get started; despite all their efforts, they left the essential unsaid, talked around it. Yet how eager they were to spill their guts, to talk from their hearts, their bowels, their entrails, to forget about their brains just this once, to lay bare the raw, unvarnished truth, the man within. (skip)
The Onion Cellar had its specialty: onions. And moreover, the onion, the cut onion, when you look at it closely. . . but enough of that, Schmuh's guests had stopped looking, they could see nothing more, because their eyes were running over and not because their hearts were so full; for it is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow, some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century. (skip) what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It mad them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. (skip)
After this cataclysm at twelve marks eighty, human beings who have had a good cry open their mouths to speak. Still hesitant, startled by their nakedness of their own words, the weepers poured out their hearts to their neighbors on the uncomfortable, burlap-covered crates, submitted to questioning, let themselves to turned inside-out like overcoats.
my poor mama, the foolish and lovable Jan Bronski, and Matzerath, the cook who knew how to transform feelings into soups? All of them needed to be wept for.
- 대학시절 그저 난잡한 책이라고 만 느껴졌던 때와는 다르게 작년 11월부터 읽기 시작해 중간중간 책의 무게가 너무 무거워 쉬어가며 읽은 책. 자라지 못하는 몸을 가진 오스카의 말로 형언해내기 어려운 생각과 그의 행동 속에 표현되지지 못한 우리자신의, 사회의, 시대의 추한 모습을 보는 듯하여 소름이 돋았다. 유리를 깨는 그의 목청과 미친듯한 드럼의 소리로 시대에 무기력한 인간의 절규를 표현해 낸 듯 하다. 그의 obscene한 생각과 행동들이 무척이나 쓸쓸하고 슬픈 것은 Gunter Grass의 천재적인 표현에 의해서만 가능한 듯.
2014년 9월 30일 화요일
Karl Jaspers의 'Way to Wisdom'중
Nor is philosophical thought, like sciences, characterized by progressive development. Beyond any doubt, we are far more advanced than Hippocrates, the Greek physician. But we are scarcely entitled to say that we have progressed beyond Plato. (skip)
The certainty to which it aspires is not of the objective, scientific sort, which is the same for every mind; it is inner certainty in which a man's whole being participates. Whereas science always pertains to particular objects, the knowledge of which is by no means indispensable to all men, philosophy deals with the whole of being, which concerns man as man, with a truth which, wherever it is manifested, moves us more deeply than any scientific knowledge.
Our own humanity, our own destiny, our own experience strike us as a sufficient basis for philosophical opinions.
(skip) The circuitous paths traveled by specialists in philosophy have meaning only if they lead man to an awareness of being and of his place in it.
(skip) Every man must accomplish it for himself.
The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) (skip) the essence of philosophy is not the possession of truth but the search for truth, (skip) Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
Philosophy is the principle of concentration through which man becomes himself, by partaking reality.
It is a task which man will face in one form or another as long as he remains man.
The Stoic Epictetus said, "Philosophy arises when we become aware of our own weakness and helplessness." (skip) By looking upon everything that is not within my power as necessary and indifferent to me, but by raising what does depend on me, namely the mode and content of my ideas, to clarity and freedom by thought.
I must die, I must suffer, I must struggle, I am subject to chance, I involve myself inexorably in guilt. We call these fundamental situations of our existence ultimate situations. (skip) Along with wonder and doubt, awareness of these ultimate situations is the most profound source of philosophy. In our day-to-day lives we often evade them, by closing our eyes and living as if they did not exist. We forget that we must die, forget our guilt, and forget that we are at the mercy of chance. We face only concrete situations and master them to our profit, we react to them by planning and acting in the world, under the impulsion of our practical interests. But to ultimate situations we react either by obfuscation or, if we really apprehend them, by despair and rebirth; we become ourselves by changing our consciousness of being.
no reliance can be placed in worldly existence.
But there is a counterweight to the general unreliability of the world: there are in the world things worthy of faith, things that arouse confidence. (skip) But precariousness of all worldly existence is a warning to us, it forbids us to content ourselves with the world: it points to something else.
The way in which man approaches his failure determines how that man will become.
I should not suffer deeply from lack of communication or find such unique pleasure in authentic communication if I for myself, in absolute solitude, could be certain of the truth. But I am only in conjunction with the Other, alone I am nothing.
And so we may say that wonder, doubt, the experience of ultimate situations are indeed the sources of philosophy, but the ultimate source is the will to authentic communication, which embraces all the rest.
As Schopenhauer said, there is no object without subject and there is no subject without object. (skip)
It can only mean that being as a whole neither subject nor object but must be the Comprehensive,
as Dasein, being-there
The fall from absolutes which were after all illusory becomes an ability to soar; what seemed an abyss becomes space for freedom; apparent Nothingness is transformed into that from which authentic being speaks to us.
But this God of the Greek thinkers is a God originating in thought, not the living God of Jeremiah. In essence the two coincide. From this twofold rook Western theology and philosophy have, in infinite modulations, reflected that God is and pondered on what He is.
limiting himself to determine object knowledge, that is to scientific cognition, he ceases to philosophize, saying: It is best not to talk of what we do not know.
God never becomes a tangible object in the world - and this means that man must not abandon his freedom to the tangibilities, authorities, powers of the world; that he bears responsibility for himself, and must not evade this responsibility by renouncing freedom ostensibly for the sake of freedom. He must owe his own decision and the road he chooses to himself.
In every case an aim determines means appropriate to it.
Only when I live by something that can no longer be explained by object knowledge do I live by the unconditional.
(skip)
the unconditional attitude implies a decision, lucidly taken, out of unfathomable depth, a decision with which I myself am identical. (skip)
The unconditional is hidden, only in extreme situations does it by silent decision determine a man's road; (skip)
since man arrives at his unconditional foundation not by the degrees but by a leap into another dimension.
The unconditional imperative is not given like empirical existence. It grows within man in time.
evil is the life of the man who remains in the sphere of the contingent, who merely lives from day to day like an animal, well or badly, in the unrest of change - a life in which there is no decision.
Good in contradiction is the life of the man who does not reject the happiness in this world but subordinates it to the morally admissible, seen as the universal law of just action.
A man can only want one thing or the other, if he is authentic. (skip) Instead of deciding, we vacillate and stumble through life, combine the one with the other and even accept such a state of things as a necessary contradiction. This indecision is in itself evil. (skip) He becomes himself when he decides which way he is going and acts accordingly.
Man is fundamentally more than he can know about himself.
In the world, those powers which have flung us to the ground strive to dominate us: fear of the future, anxious attachment to present possessions, care in the face of dire possibilities. Opposing them man can perhaps in the face of death gain a confidence which will enable him, even in the most extreme, inexplicable, meaningless situation, to die in peace.
To be a man is to become a man.
We have heard the outcry: Science destroys faith. Greek science could be built into faith and was useful for its elucidation, but modern science is utterly ruinous. (skip)
Where science lost man falls into the twilight of vaguely edifying sentiments, of fanatical decisions arrived at in self-willed blindness. Barriers are erected, man is led into new prisons.
The spiritual process which took place between 800 to 200 B.C. seems to constitute such an axis. (skip) "axial age." Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose, it was the era of MoTse, Chuang Tse and countless others. In India it was the age of the Upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were developed. In Iran Zarathustra put forward his challenging conception of the cosmic process as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets arose: Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the tragic poets, Thucydides, and Archimedes. All the vast development of which these names are a mere intimation took place in these few centuries, independently and almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West.
(skip) And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.
(skip)
For the first time there were philosophers. Men dared to stand upon their own feet as individuals. Hermits and wandering thinkers in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece, prophets in Israel may be grouped together, greatly as they differ in faith, ideas, and inner attitude. Man opposed his own inwardness to the whole world. He discovered in himself the primal source, by virtue of which he might rise above himself and the world.
(skip) renaissances. True, there have been great new spiritual creations but they have been inspired by ideas acquired in the axial age. (skip)
But today we are living in the era of the most terrible catastrophes. It seems as though everything that had been transmitted to us were being melted down, and yet there is no convincing sigh that a new edifice is in the making.
Being is revealed in man through his dealings with other men.
When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelmed events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at the end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history.
Yet we must remain aware of our epoch and our situation. (skip) We must not adjust our potentialities to the low level of our age, not subordinate ourselves to our epoch, but attempt, by elucidating the age, to arrive at the point where we can live out of our primal source.
(skip) By making history our own, we cast an anchor through history into eternity.
An irresponsible playing with contradictions permits such a man to take any position he finds convenient. He is versed in all methods but adheres strictly to none. (skip) No authentic discussion with him is possible but only a talking back and forth about a wide variety of "interesting" things.
(skip)
We drift along, without desire to do or to be anything in particular. We do what is asked of us or what seems appropriate. Genuine emotion is absurd. We are helpful in our everyday dealings with men.
No horizon, so distance, neither past nor future sustain this life which expects nothing and lives only here and now.
let us be master of our thoughts;
(skip)
let us acquire the power to learn from all the past by making it our own; let us listen from our contemporaries and remain open to all possibilities;
let each of us as an individual immerse himself in his own historicity, in his origin, in what he has done; let him posses himself of what he was, of what he has become, and of what has been given to him;
let us not to cease to grow through our own historicity into the historicity of man as a whole and thus make ourselves into citizens of the world.
(skip) only by rising from the chains that bind us to our emotions, not by destroying them do we come to ourselves. (skip) Then we shall suffer without complaining, despair without succumbing; we shall be shake but not overturned, for the inner independence that grows up in us will sustain us.
by repetition we must gain depth.
The desire to lead a philosophical life springs from the darkness in which the individual finds himself, from his sense of forlornness when he stares without love into the void, from his self-forgetfulness when he feels that he is being consumed by the busy-ness of the world, when he suddenly wakes up in terror and asks himself: What am I, what am I failing to do, what should I do?
(skip) it may even lead a man to feel that he is part of the machine, interchangeably shunted in here and there, and when left free, to feel that he is nothing and can do nothing with himself. (skip)
He must snatch himself out of it if he is not to lose himself to the world, to habits, to thoughtless banalities, to the beaten track.
What I gain for myself alone in reflection would - if it were all - be as nothing gained.
(skip) The truth begins with two.
Consequently philosophy demands: seek constant communication, risk it without reserve, renounce the defiant self-assertion which forces itself upon you in ever new disguises, live in the hope that in our very renunciation you will in some incalculable way be given back to yourself.
To philosophize is then at once to learn how to live and to how how to die.
(skip)
If to philosophize is to learn how to die, then we must learn how to die in order to lead a good life. To learn to live and learn how to die are one and the same thing.
Meditation teaches us the power of thought.
Thought is the beginning of human existence.
Our states of being are only manifestations of existential striving or failure. It lies in our very nature to be on the way.
(skip)
The ascent of philosophical life is the ascent of the individual man.
Having oriented himself on secure dry land - through realistic observation, through the special sciences, through logic and methodology - the philosopher at the limits of this land, explores the world of ideas over tranquil paths. And now like a butterfly he flutters over the ocean shore, out over the water; he spies a ship in which he would like to go on a voyage of discovery, to seek out the one thing which as transcendence is present in his existence. He peers after the ship - the method of philosophical thoughts and philosophical life - the ship which he sees and yet can never fully reach; and he struggles to reach it, sometimes strangely staggering and reeling.
We are creatures of this sort, and we are lost if we relinquish our orientation to the dry land. But we are not content to remain there. That is why our flutterings are so uncertain and perhaps so absurd to those who sit secure and content on dry land, and are intelligible only to those who have seized by the same unrest. For them the world is a point of departure for that flight upon which everything depends, which each man must venture on his own though in common with other men, and which can never become the object of any doctrine.
The churches are for all, philosophy for individuals. (skip) Philosophy is an expression of a realm of minds linked with one another through all people and ages; it is represented by no institution which excludes and welcomes.
Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza were solitary thinkers, without any institution behind them, seeking the truth for its own sake;
For philosophy is essentially concerned with the present. We have only one reality, and that is here and now. What we miss by our evasions will never return, but if we squander ourselves, then too we lose being. Each day is precious: a moment is everything.
We are remiss in our task if you lose ourselves in the past or future. Only through present reality can we gain access to the timeless: only in apprehending time can we attain to that sphere where all time is extinguished.
Even Greeks, to be sure, conceived of science as methodical, cogently certain, and universally valid knowledge. (skip)
To modern science nothing is indifferent. (skip) There is nothing that can evade it. Nothing must be hidden or passed alone in silence; nothing must remain a mystery.
Today neither theology nor philosophy creates a whole.
we are always on our way to a solution. And in this history helps us. Independent thinking does not spring from the void. What we think must have roots in reality.
And the very essence of philosophical thought is openness to the truth as a whole, not to barren, abstract truth but to truth in the diversity of its supreme realizations.
- 한국에서 읽은 '철학입문'을 다시 영어로 읽음. 언어에 따라 느껴지는 울림은 약간은 다른 듯 하지만 와 닿는 부분은 결국 같은 구절들이다.
Jaspers의 철학은 Nietzsche나 Sartre처럼 참신한 생각의 벌침을 맞는 것처럼 느껴지는 것이 아니라 너무도 자명한 삶의 본질적 부분이나 일상의 삶에서 간과되고 있는 부분을 잘 보여주고 일깨워 준다. 철학은 한 사람의 생각에서 시작되어 철학적 자세로 발전되고 다른 사람과의 관계에서 그 결실을 가지는 것, 道上의 철학. 결과가 아니라 과정으로서 인간의 삶을 시간과 역사속에서 빛을 비추어 주는 것. 이러한 철학적 삶으로의 비약이 현실을 부정하는 것이 아니라 현실에 단단히 뿌리를 내리고 비상과 항해를 꿈꾸고 계획하고 실천하는 것. '인간은 자기 자신이 되는 것이다.'라는 그의 말에 그의 생각이 응축되어 있는 것 같다. 그는 모든 것을 포용하면서도 치우치지 않으며 인간 존재에 대한 절대적 긍정을 가지고 살아나가는 것을 가르친다. 무엇보다도 불안정한 각박한 현대를 살아가는 데 필요한 가치인 듯.
The certainty to which it aspires is not of the objective, scientific sort, which is the same for every mind; it is inner certainty in which a man's whole being participates. Whereas science always pertains to particular objects, the knowledge of which is by no means indispensable to all men, philosophy deals with the whole of being, which concerns man as man, with a truth which, wherever it is manifested, moves us more deeply than any scientific knowledge.
Our own humanity, our own destiny, our own experience strike us as a sufficient basis for philosophical opinions.
(skip) The circuitous paths traveled by specialists in philosophy have meaning only if they lead man to an awareness of being and of his place in it.
(skip) Every man must accomplish it for himself.
The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) (skip) the essence of philosophy is not the possession of truth but the search for truth, (skip) Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
Philosophy is the principle of concentration through which man becomes himself, by partaking reality.
It is a task which man will face in one form or another as long as he remains man.
The Stoic Epictetus said, "Philosophy arises when we become aware of our own weakness and helplessness." (skip) By looking upon everything that is not within my power as necessary and indifferent to me, but by raising what does depend on me, namely the mode and content of my ideas, to clarity and freedom by thought.
I must die, I must suffer, I must struggle, I am subject to chance, I involve myself inexorably in guilt. We call these fundamental situations of our existence ultimate situations. (skip) Along with wonder and doubt, awareness of these ultimate situations is the most profound source of philosophy. In our day-to-day lives we often evade them, by closing our eyes and living as if they did not exist. We forget that we must die, forget our guilt, and forget that we are at the mercy of chance. We face only concrete situations and master them to our profit, we react to them by planning and acting in the world, under the impulsion of our practical interests. But to ultimate situations we react either by obfuscation or, if we really apprehend them, by despair and rebirth; we become ourselves by changing our consciousness of being.
no reliance can be placed in worldly existence.
But there is a counterweight to the general unreliability of the world: there are in the world things worthy of faith, things that arouse confidence. (skip) But precariousness of all worldly existence is a warning to us, it forbids us to content ourselves with the world: it points to something else.
The way in which man approaches his failure determines how that man will become.
I should not suffer deeply from lack of communication or find such unique pleasure in authentic communication if I for myself, in absolute solitude, could be certain of the truth. But I am only in conjunction with the Other, alone I am nothing.
And so we may say that wonder, doubt, the experience of ultimate situations are indeed the sources of philosophy, but the ultimate source is the will to authentic communication, which embraces all the rest.
As Schopenhauer said, there is no object without subject and there is no subject without object. (skip)
It can only mean that being as a whole neither subject nor object but must be the Comprehensive,
as Dasein, being-there
The fall from absolutes which were after all illusory becomes an ability to soar; what seemed an abyss becomes space for freedom; apparent Nothingness is transformed into that from which authentic being speaks to us.
But this God of the Greek thinkers is a God originating in thought, not the living God of Jeremiah. In essence the two coincide. From this twofold rook Western theology and philosophy have, in infinite modulations, reflected that God is and pondered on what He is.
limiting himself to determine object knowledge, that is to scientific cognition, he ceases to philosophize, saying: It is best not to talk of what we do not know.
God never becomes a tangible object in the world - and this means that man must not abandon his freedom to the tangibilities, authorities, powers of the world; that he bears responsibility for himself, and must not evade this responsibility by renouncing freedom ostensibly for the sake of freedom. He must owe his own decision and the road he chooses to himself.
In every case an aim determines means appropriate to it.
Only when I live by something that can no longer be explained by object knowledge do I live by the unconditional.
(skip)
the unconditional attitude implies a decision, lucidly taken, out of unfathomable depth, a decision with which I myself am identical. (skip)
The unconditional is hidden, only in extreme situations does it by silent decision determine a man's road; (skip)
since man arrives at his unconditional foundation not by the degrees but by a leap into another dimension.
The unconditional imperative is not given like empirical existence. It grows within man in time.
evil is the life of the man who remains in the sphere of the contingent, who merely lives from day to day like an animal, well or badly, in the unrest of change - a life in which there is no decision.
Good in contradiction is the life of the man who does not reject the happiness in this world but subordinates it to the morally admissible, seen as the universal law of just action.
A man can only want one thing or the other, if he is authentic. (skip) Instead of deciding, we vacillate and stumble through life, combine the one with the other and even accept such a state of things as a necessary contradiction. This indecision is in itself evil. (skip) He becomes himself when he decides which way he is going and acts accordingly.
Man is fundamentally more than he can know about himself.
In the world, those powers which have flung us to the ground strive to dominate us: fear of the future, anxious attachment to present possessions, care in the face of dire possibilities. Opposing them man can perhaps in the face of death gain a confidence which will enable him, even in the most extreme, inexplicable, meaningless situation, to die in peace.
To be a man is to become a man.
We have heard the outcry: Science destroys faith. Greek science could be built into faith and was useful for its elucidation, but modern science is utterly ruinous. (skip)
Where science lost man falls into the twilight of vaguely edifying sentiments, of fanatical decisions arrived at in self-willed blindness. Barriers are erected, man is led into new prisons.
The spiritual process which took place between 800 to 200 B.C. seems to constitute such an axis. (skip) "axial age." Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose, it was the era of MoTse, Chuang Tse and countless others. In India it was the age of the Upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were developed. In Iran Zarathustra put forward his challenging conception of the cosmic process as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets arose: Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the tragic poets, Thucydides, and Archimedes. All the vast development of which these names are a mere intimation took place in these few centuries, independently and almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West.
(skip) And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.
(skip)
For the first time there were philosophers. Men dared to stand upon their own feet as individuals. Hermits and wandering thinkers in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece, prophets in Israel may be grouped together, greatly as they differ in faith, ideas, and inner attitude. Man opposed his own inwardness to the whole world. He discovered in himself the primal source, by virtue of which he might rise above himself and the world.
(skip) renaissances. True, there have been great new spiritual creations but they have been inspired by ideas acquired in the axial age. (skip)
But today we are living in the era of the most terrible catastrophes. It seems as though everything that had been transmitted to us were being melted down, and yet there is no convincing sigh that a new edifice is in the making.
Being is revealed in man through his dealings with other men.
When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelmed events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at the end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history.
Yet we must remain aware of our epoch and our situation. (skip) We must not adjust our potentialities to the low level of our age, not subordinate ourselves to our epoch, but attempt, by elucidating the age, to arrive at the point where we can live out of our primal source.
(skip) By making history our own, we cast an anchor through history into eternity.
An irresponsible playing with contradictions permits such a man to take any position he finds convenient. He is versed in all methods but adheres strictly to none. (skip) No authentic discussion with him is possible but only a talking back and forth about a wide variety of "interesting" things.
(skip)
We drift along, without desire to do or to be anything in particular. We do what is asked of us or what seems appropriate. Genuine emotion is absurd. We are helpful in our everyday dealings with men.
No horizon, so distance, neither past nor future sustain this life which expects nothing and lives only here and now.
let us be master of our thoughts;
(skip)
let us acquire the power to learn from all the past by making it our own; let us listen from our contemporaries and remain open to all possibilities;
let each of us as an individual immerse himself in his own historicity, in his origin, in what he has done; let him posses himself of what he was, of what he has become, and of what has been given to him;
let us not to cease to grow through our own historicity into the historicity of man as a whole and thus make ourselves into citizens of the world.
(skip) only by rising from the chains that bind us to our emotions, not by destroying them do we come to ourselves. (skip) Then we shall suffer without complaining, despair without succumbing; we shall be shake but not overturned, for the inner independence that grows up in us will sustain us.
by repetition we must gain depth.
The desire to lead a philosophical life springs from the darkness in which the individual finds himself, from his sense of forlornness when he stares without love into the void, from his self-forgetfulness when he feels that he is being consumed by the busy-ness of the world, when he suddenly wakes up in terror and asks himself: What am I, what am I failing to do, what should I do?
(skip) it may even lead a man to feel that he is part of the machine, interchangeably shunted in here and there, and when left free, to feel that he is nothing and can do nothing with himself. (skip)
He must snatch himself out of it if he is not to lose himself to the world, to habits, to thoughtless banalities, to the beaten track.
What I gain for myself alone in reflection would - if it were all - be as nothing gained.
(skip) The truth begins with two.
Consequently philosophy demands: seek constant communication, risk it without reserve, renounce the defiant self-assertion which forces itself upon you in ever new disguises, live in the hope that in our very renunciation you will in some incalculable way be given back to yourself.
To philosophize is then at once to learn how to live and to how how to die.
(skip)
If to philosophize is to learn how to die, then we must learn how to die in order to lead a good life. To learn to live and learn how to die are one and the same thing.
Meditation teaches us the power of thought.
Thought is the beginning of human existence.
Our states of being are only manifestations of existential striving or failure. It lies in our very nature to be on the way.
(skip)
The ascent of philosophical life is the ascent of the individual man.
Having oriented himself on secure dry land - through realistic observation, through the special sciences, through logic and methodology - the philosopher at the limits of this land, explores the world of ideas over tranquil paths. And now like a butterfly he flutters over the ocean shore, out over the water; he spies a ship in which he would like to go on a voyage of discovery, to seek out the one thing which as transcendence is present in his existence. He peers after the ship - the method of philosophical thoughts and philosophical life - the ship which he sees and yet can never fully reach; and he struggles to reach it, sometimes strangely staggering and reeling.
We are creatures of this sort, and we are lost if we relinquish our orientation to the dry land. But we are not content to remain there. That is why our flutterings are so uncertain and perhaps so absurd to those who sit secure and content on dry land, and are intelligible only to those who have seized by the same unrest. For them the world is a point of departure for that flight upon which everything depends, which each man must venture on his own though in common with other men, and which can never become the object of any doctrine.
The churches are for all, philosophy for individuals. (skip) Philosophy is an expression of a realm of minds linked with one another through all people and ages; it is represented by no institution which excludes and welcomes.
Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza were solitary thinkers, without any institution behind them, seeking the truth for its own sake;
For philosophy is essentially concerned with the present. We have only one reality, and that is here and now. What we miss by our evasions will never return, but if we squander ourselves, then too we lose being. Each day is precious: a moment is everything.
We are remiss in our task if you lose ourselves in the past or future. Only through present reality can we gain access to the timeless: only in apprehending time can we attain to that sphere where all time is extinguished.
Even Greeks, to be sure, conceived of science as methodical, cogently certain, and universally valid knowledge. (skip)
To modern science nothing is indifferent. (skip) There is nothing that can evade it. Nothing must be hidden or passed alone in silence; nothing must remain a mystery.
Today neither theology nor philosophy creates a whole.
we are always on our way to a solution. And in this history helps us. Independent thinking does not spring from the void. What we think must have roots in reality.
And the very essence of philosophical thought is openness to the truth as a whole, not to barren, abstract truth but to truth in the diversity of its supreme realizations.
- 한국에서 읽은 '철학입문'을 다시 영어로 읽음. 언어에 따라 느껴지는 울림은 약간은 다른 듯 하지만 와 닿는 부분은 결국 같은 구절들이다.
Jaspers의 철학은 Nietzsche나 Sartre처럼 참신한 생각의 벌침을 맞는 것처럼 느껴지는 것이 아니라 너무도 자명한 삶의 본질적 부분이나 일상의 삶에서 간과되고 있는 부분을 잘 보여주고 일깨워 준다. 철학은 한 사람의 생각에서 시작되어 철학적 자세로 발전되고 다른 사람과의 관계에서 그 결실을 가지는 것, 道上의 철학. 결과가 아니라 과정으로서 인간의 삶을 시간과 역사속에서 빛을 비추어 주는 것. 이러한 철학적 삶으로의 비약이 현실을 부정하는 것이 아니라 현실에 단단히 뿌리를 내리고 비상과 항해를 꿈꾸고 계획하고 실천하는 것. '인간은 자기 자신이 되는 것이다.'라는 그의 말에 그의 생각이 응축되어 있는 것 같다. 그는 모든 것을 포용하면서도 치우치지 않으며 인간 존재에 대한 절대적 긍정을 가지고 살아나가는 것을 가르친다. 무엇보다도 불안정한 각박한 현대를 살아가는 데 필요한 가치인 듯.
2014년 9월 16일 화요일
Victor E. Frankl 의 'Man's Search for Meaning' 중
if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's own shelves.
<Harold S. Kushner in 'Forward' Chapter>
I. EXPERIENCES IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP
Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (the were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.
As inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beuaty of art and nature as never before. (skip) If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor-or maybe because of it - we were carried away by nature's beauty, which we had missed for so long.
The violin wept and a part of me wept with it.
Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of sufferings."
What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as we form clear and precise picture of it.
Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,"
And I quoted Nietzsche: "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker." (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)
Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.
Here it was not one's fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.
II. LOGOTHERAPY IN A NUTSHELL
Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by patient in his future.
Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning." (skip) focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man.
This meaning is unique and specific in that is must and can be fulfilled by him alone; (skip) Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!
Through an analysis lasting five years, the patient had been prompted more and more to accept his analyst's interpretations until he finally was unable to see the forest of reality for the trees of symbols and images. (skip) I would strictly deny that one's search for a meaning to his existence, or even his doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in , any disease. (skip) A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void withing themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the "existential vacuum."
No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do.
Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot replaced, nor can his life be repeated. (skip)
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life;
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. (skip)
but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life;
"Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"
"the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, (skip) we are challenged to change ourselves.
To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
I have made a better human being out of my son."
But man is more than psyche.
things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment - he has made out of himself. (skip) behave like swine while others behave like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
POSTSCRIPT 1984
that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered.
But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.
As for causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, (skip) that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have means. (skip) being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. (skip) The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
but he did decide not to let himself be broken by what had happened to him.
young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past - the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the value they have realized - and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
(but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) (skip) decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
- Nazi 의 집단수용소에서 살아남은 심리학자이자 의사인 Frankl 박사의 tragic optimism에 대한 의문은 인간의 자신의 삶에 대한 의미로 귀결된다고 이 책은 말하고 있다. 사람이 생각할 수 있는 극단의 상황에서, 동료의 대부분이 가스실의 연기로 사라지는 상황에서, 가족이 죽어가는 상황에서, 그래도 살아낼 수 있었던 힘의 근원은 무엇인가? 그는 인간이 자신의 생에서 의미를 찾을 수 있다면 아니면 혹은 의미를 찾거나 의심하는 과정에서 그 모든 역경의 과정에 의미가 부여된다고 말한다.
극단적인 고통의 상황뿐만 아니라, 인생이라는 여정에 포함된 모든 고난의 과정에서 자신에게만 독특한 의미를 찾아나가는 것이 인생을 제대로 살아가는 과정이라고. 그 절대적 긍정의 힘은 어디서 비롯되는가? 그것은 한 개인이 자신의 삶의 의미를 찾아나가는 데서 (혹은 심지어 의미를 의심하는 데에서부터도) 시작한다고 그는 역설한다. 이 존재의 의미를 찾지 못하면 존재의 진공상태에 빠지거나 잘못된 방향으로 (힘에의 의지, 돈에의 의지, 즐거움에의 안착 등) 에너지를 쏟게 된다고 한다. 인간은 조건의 산물이 아니라 스스로 결정의 산물이며, 자신은 자기자신으로부터 만들어진다고 한다.
그의 tragic optimism에 절대적으로 긍정할 수 있는가? 아마도 그렇다고 말하기에는 나의 경험의 폭이 너무도 작다. 그러나 그의 주체적 인간으로서의 삶을 의미를 찾는 과정으로의 관점을 그의 경험으로서 증명해보인 것에 대해서는 가슴깊은 동의 밖에 할 수 없는 것 같다. 또한 'logotherapy'라는 영역으로 인간에게 필요한 것은 결국 자신의 삶의 의미라는 것을 깨닫는 과정, Jaspers 가 말한대로 '인간은 자기 자신이 되는 것이다'라는 말과도 상통한다. 집단 수용소에서 Frankl박사가 수없이 자신에게 되내인 것처럼, 니체가 말한대로 'why'를 발견하면 'how'는 어떻게든 되는 것인지도.
<Harold S. Kushner in 'Forward' Chapter>
I. EXPERIENCES IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP
Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (the were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.
As inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beuaty of art and nature as never before. (skip) If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor-or maybe because of it - we were carried away by nature's beauty, which we had missed for so long.
The violin wept and a part of me wept with it.
Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of sufferings."
What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as we form clear and precise picture of it.
Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,"
And I quoted Nietzsche: "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker." (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)
Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.
Here it was not one's fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.
II. LOGOTHERAPY IN A NUTSHELL
Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by patient in his future.
Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning." (skip) focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man.
This meaning is unique and specific in that is must and can be fulfilled by him alone; (skip) Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!
Through an analysis lasting five years, the patient had been prompted more and more to accept his analyst's interpretations until he finally was unable to see the forest of reality for the trees of symbols and images. (skip) I would strictly deny that one's search for a meaning to his existence, or even his doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in , any disease. (skip) A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void withing themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the "existential vacuum."
No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do.
Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot replaced, nor can his life be repeated. (skip)
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life;
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. (skip)
but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life;
"Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"
"the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, (skip) we are challenged to change ourselves.
To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
I have made a better human being out of my son."
But man is more than psyche.
things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment - he has made out of himself. (skip) behave like swine while others behave like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
POSTSCRIPT 1984
that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered.
But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.
As for causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, (skip) that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have means. (skip) being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. (skip) The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
but he did decide not to let himself be broken by what had happened to him.
young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past - the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the value they have realized - and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
(but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) (skip) decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
- Nazi 의 집단수용소에서 살아남은 심리학자이자 의사인 Frankl 박사의 tragic optimism에 대한 의문은 인간의 자신의 삶에 대한 의미로 귀결된다고 이 책은 말하고 있다. 사람이 생각할 수 있는 극단의 상황에서, 동료의 대부분이 가스실의 연기로 사라지는 상황에서, 가족이 죽어가는 상황에서, 그래도 살아낼 수 있었던 힘의 근원은 무엇인가? 그는 인간이 자신의 생에서 의미를 찾을 수 있다면 아니면 혹은 의미를 찾거나 의심하는 과정에서 그 모든 역경의 과정에 의미가 부여된다고 말한다.
극단적인 고통의 상황뿐만 아니라, 인생이라는 여정에 포함된 모든 고난의 과정에서 자신에게만 독특한 의미를 찾아나가는 것이 인생을 제대로 살아가는 과정이라고. 그 절대적 긍정의 힘은 어디서 비롯되는가? 그것은 한 개인이 자신의 삶의 의미를 찾아나가는 데서 (혹은 심지어 의미를 의심하는 데에서부터도) 시작한다고 그는 역설한다. 이 존재의 의미를 찾지 못하면 존재의 진공상태에 빠지거나 잘못된 방향으로 (힘에의 의지, 돈에의 의지, 즐거움에의 안착 등) 에너지를 쏟게 된다고 한다. 인간은 조건의 산물이 아니라 스스로 결정의 산물이며, 자신은 자기자신으로부터 만들어진다고 한다.
그의 tragic optimism에 절대적으로 긍정할 수 있는가? 아마도 그렇다고 말하기에는 나의 경험의 폭이 너무도 작다. 그러나 그의 주체적 인간으로서의 삶을 의미를 찾는 과정으로의 관점을 그의 경험으로서 증명해보인 것에 대해서는 가슴깊은 동의 밖에 할 수 없는 것 같다. 또한 'logotherapy'라는 영역으로 인간에게 필요한 것은 결국 자신의 삶의 의미라는 것을 깨닫는 과정, Jaspers 가 말한대로 '인간은 자기 자신이 되는 것이다'라는 말과도 상통한다. 집단 수용소에서 Frankl박사가 수없이 자신에게 되내인 것처럼, 니체가 말한대로 'why'를 발견하면 'how'는 어떻게든 되는 것인지도.
2014년 8월 3일 일요일
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross의 'On Life after Death' 중
If you have a clear conscience and are doing your work with love, others will spit on you and try to make your life miserable. Then, ten years later, you are honored with eighteen doctorates for the same work.
If you do not push this statement aside, but continue to sit and listen, then the dying one will tell you all he wants to share. After the patient dies you will have a good feeling because you may have been the only person who took his words seriously.
You, too, have to know when apporoaching the bed of your dying mother and father, who may be in a deep coma, that this woman or man can hear everything you say. At those moments it is not too late to say: "Sorry," or "I love you," or whatever else you want to say. For these words, it si never too late to say them, even to the dead ones, because they can still hear you. .Even then you can finish "unfinished business" which you might have carried with you for ten or twenty years.
When they die, they will know anyway.
There is proof that every human being, from his birth until his death, is guided by a spirit entity. Everyone has such a spirit guide, whether you believe it or not.
you are simply received by those who meant the most to you.
After you have passed this tunnel, bridge, or mountain pass, you are at its end embraced by light. This light is whiter that white.
During this review of your earthly life you will not blame God for your fate, but you will know that you yourself were your own worst enemy since you are now accusing yourself of having neglected so many opportunities to grow.
Think about the fact that those people for whom you select the most costly Christmas presents are often those people you fear the most, and for whom your feelings are the most negative ones.
If you live well, you will never have to worry about dying. You can do that even if you have only one day to live.
becuase to go to a place that you love is easy. To go to a place where you have every bit of it, is a test.
I identified myself with their misery and their lonelines and their desperation, and suddenly my patients started to talk, even people who didn't talk for twenty years.
but knowledge alone is not going to help anybody. If you do not use your head and your heart and your soul, you are not going to help a single human being. (skip) each one has a purpose.
You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden and somebody brings you gorgeous food on a silver platter. But you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand but take the pain and learn to accept it not as a curse, or a punishment, but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.
You can finally do the things that you really want to do. How many of you truly do the kind of work that you really want to do from the bottom of your heart? If you don't, you should go home and change your work.
Almost all of my patients are children now. I take them home to die.
The work with death and dying was simply a testing ground for me, to see if I can take hardship, abuse, and resistance. And I passed the test. The second test was to see if I could handle fame. And that didn't affect me, so I passed that too.
But my real job is, and this is why I need your help, to tell people that death does not exist. (skip) Get rid of all your negativity and begin to view life as a challenge, a testing ground of your own inner resources and strength.
You make your own hell or your own heaven by the way you have lived.
Spirituality is an awareness that there is something far greater than we are, something that created this universe, created life, and that we are an authentic, important, significant part of it, and can contribute to its evolution.
why no one can die alone.
"Honey, don't die on me, I can't live without you." So, what we are doing to those patients, is to make them, in a sense, guilty of dying on us.
Shanti Nilaya, mean the final home of peace,
Trying to keep a lid on their emotions in the presence of other family members makes them awfully shor tempered and vulnerable to outbursts of tears for the smallest reason. (skip)
It takes time to heal. It takes time to mourn. (skip) Never judge or criticize anyone who tried to cope with the loss of a parent in his own way. There are coping mechanisms which may work for them that are inconceivable for you.
- '어떻게 죽을 것인가'라는 문제에 대해서 문득 문득 생각하기 시작할 무렵, 슬픔의 위안이라는 책을 읽게 되었고 그 책은 이 책으로 이어졌다. '어떻게 죽을 것인가'하는 문제가 결론적으로는 '어떻게 살 것인가'라는 문제로 귀결된다는 것은 반가운 일이다. Kubler-Ross박사는 죽음을 '끝' 혹은 '종말'로 보지 않고 '변환'의 과정으로 보고 있다. 수많은 death beds의 곁을 지키면서 그녀는 죽음이 존재하지 않는다고 역설하고 있다. 죽음은 단지 애벌레가 나비로 탈바꿈하는 과정에 지나지 않는다는 것이다. 그녀는 오히려 이 죽음이 올 때까지 우리 인생을 어떻게 성장시켜 나갈 것이냐에 오히려 촛점을 두고 있다.
세상에서 가장 무서운 것이 있다면, 모든 공포 영화의 결말처럼, 바로 '죽음'일 것이다. 아마도 그것은 그에 대한 철저한 무지로부터 생겨나는 것인지도 모른다. 그녀의 죽음에 대한 부인에 대해서도 100% 동의하지는 않지만 그녀의 삶에 대한 생각은 100% 동의하는 바이다. 그리고 삶을 떠나가는 사람들에게 어떻게 대해야 하는지 그리고 남겨진 사람들에게 어떻게 위로가 되어야 하는지 조금은 더 알 수 있을 것 같다.
죽음을 아는 것은 삶을 더욱 소중하고 아끼도록 만들어 주는 듯.
If you do not push this statement aside, but continue to sit and listen, then the dying one will tell you all he wants to share. After the patient dies you will have a good feeling because you may have been the only person who took his words seriously.
You, too, have to know when apporoaching the bed of your dying mother and father, who may be in a deep coma, that this woman or man can hear everything you say. At those moments it is not too late to say: "Sorry," or "I love you," or whatever else you want to say. For these words, it si never too late to say them, even to the dead ones, because they can still hear you. .Even then you can finish "unfinished business" which you might have carried with you for ten or twenty years.
When they die, they will know anyway.
There is proof that every human being, from his birth until his death, is guided by a spirit entity. Everyone has such a spirit guide, whether you believe it or not.
you are simply received by those who meant the most to you.
After you have passed this tunnel, bridge, or mountain pass, you are at its end embraced by light. This light is whiter that white.
During this review of your earthly life you will not blame God for your fate, but you will know that you yourself were your own worst enemy since you are now accusing yourself of having neglected so many opportunities to grow.
Think about the fact that those people for whom you select the most costly Christmas presents are often those people you fear the most, and for whom your feelings are the most negative ones.
If you live well, you will never have to worry about dying. You can do that even if you have only one day to live.
becuase to go to a place that you love is easy. To go to a place where you have every bit of it, is a test.
I identified myself with their misery and their lonelines and their desperation, and suddenly my patients started to talk, even people who didn't talk for twenty years.
but knowledge alone is not going to help anybody. If you do not use your head and your heart and your soul, you are not going to help a single human being. (skip) each one has a purpose.
You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden and somebody brings you gorgeous food on a silver platter. But you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand but take the pain and learn to accept it not as a curse, or a punishment, but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.
You can finally do the things that you really want to do. How many of you truly do the kind of work that you really want to do from the bottom of your heart? If you don't, you should go home and change your work.
Almost all of my patients are children now. I take them home to die.
The work with death and dying was simply a testing ground for me, to see if I can take hardship, abuse, and resistance. And I passed the test. The second test was to see if I could handle fame. And that didn't affect me, so I passed that too.
But my real job is, and this is why I need your help, to tell people that death does not exist. (skip) Get rid of all your negativity and begin to view life as a challenge, a testing ground of your own inner resources and strength.
You make your own hell or your own heaven by the way you have lived.
Spirituality is an awareness that there is something far greater than we are, something that created this universe, created life, and that we are an authentic, important, significant part of it, and can contribute to its evolution.
why no one can die alone.
"Honey, don't die on me, I can't live without you." So, what we are doing to those patients, is to make them, in a sense, guilty of dying on us.
Shanti Nilaya, mean the final home of peace,
Trying to keep a lid on their emotions in the presence of other family members makes them awfully shor tempered and vulnerable to outbursts of tears for the smallest reason. (skip)
It takes time to heal. It takes time to mourn. (skip) Never judge or criticize anyone who tried to cope with the loss of a parent in his own way. There are coping mechanisms which may work for them that are inconceivable for you.
- '어떻게 죽을 것인가'라는 문제에 대해서 문득 문득 생각하기 시작할 무렵, 슬픔의 위안이라는 책을 읽게 되었고 그 책은 이 책으로 이어졌다. '어떻게 죽을 것인가'하는 문제가 결론적으로는 '어떻게 살 것인가'라는 문제로 귀결된다는 것은 반가운 일이다. Kubler-Ross박사는 죽음을 '끝' 혹은 '종말'로 보지 않고 '변환'의 과정으로 보고 있다. 수많은 death beds의 곁을 지키면서 그녀는 죽음이 존재하지 않는다고 역설하고 있다. 죽음은 단지 애벌레가 나비로 탈바꿈하는 과정에 지나지 않는다는 것이다. 그녀는 오히려 이 죽음이 올 때까지 우리 인생을 어떻게 성장시켜 나갈 것이냐에 오히려 촛점을 두고 있다.
세상에서 가장 무서운 것이 있다면, 모든 공포 영화의 결말처럼, 바로 '죽음'일 것이다. 아마도 그것은 그에 대한 철저한 무지로부터 생겨나는 것인지도 모른다. 그녀의 죽음에 대한 부인에 대해서도 100% 동의하지는 않지만 그녀의 삶에 대한 생각은 100% 동의하는 바이다. 그리고 삶을 떠나가는 사람들에게 어떻게 대해야 하는지 그리고 남겨진 사람들에게 어떻게 위로가 되어야 하는지 조금은 더 알 수 있을 것 같다.
죽음을 아는 것은 삶을 더욱 소중하고 아끼도록 만들어 주는 듯.
2014년 7월 6일 일요일
정호승의 '내 인생에 용기가 되어준 한마디' 중
'한 일 (一) 자를 10년 쓰면 붓끝에서 강물이 흐른다'
사진을 찍으려면 천 번을 찍어라.
'마음속에 푸른 가지를 품고 있으면 새가 날아와 그곳에 앉는다'는 중국 속담
척박한 땅에 뿌리를 내리는 아카시아는 살아남으려고 가시를 먼저 틔웁니다. 그러다가 오랜 세월 동안 둥치가 굵어지면서 가시 없이도 생존할 수 있게 되면 그때서야 꽃을 피우고 꿀을 생산합니다.
가지와 줄기가 뒤틀렸다고 해서 꽃마저 아름답지 않은 나무는 없습니다. 절망과 고통을 지나며 홀로 베개에 눈물을 적셔본 자만이 별빛이 아름답다는 것을 알게 됩니다.
인생은 자기가 생각한 대로 된다.
'서둘러 걸으면 라싸에 도착할 수 없다'는 티베트 속담
분노는 열려 있는 모든 문을 닫고 인내는 닫혀 있는 모든 문을 엽니다.
마라톤 선수에게 가장 요구되는 것은 레이스 끝까지 최고의 스피드를 유지하는 지구력입니다. 그러기 위해서는 자기 페이스를 마지막까지 잃지 않는 것이 중요합니다.
그런 용무늬는 용목이라는 나무에 있는데 그런 이름의 나무가 따로 있는 것은 아닙니다. 그저 느티나무에서 간혹 발견될 뿐입니다.
용목은 사실 심하게 상처받은 나무입니다. 병이 깊어 제대로 자라지 못하고 몸의 한 부분이 옹이 지고 뒤틀린 나무입니다. 오랜 세월 가슴에 병을 품고 상처를 안으로만 다독이고 견디느라 다른 부분보다 더 단단해진 부분을 지닌 나무입니다. 말하자면 나무 안에서 자란 암 덩어리가 용무늬로 나타난 것입니다.
친구를 일컬어 '내 뼈를 묻어줄 사람, 내 관머리를 잡아줄 사람'으로 표현합니다.
하버드대 졸업장보다 독서하는 습관이 더 중요하다.
마이크로소프트사 창업주 빌 게이츠의 이 말은 독서의 중요성을 강조하는 데에 부족함이 없습니다. (중략)
"컴퓨터가 책을 완전히 대체할 수는 없다. 내가 살던 마을의 작은 도서관이 지금의 나를 만들었다"라고 말합니다.
밤하늘은 별을 사랑해도 자신을 온통 별로 채우지 않는다.
종이 한 장 자르는 데 도끼질하지 마라
과잉된 행위는 과잉된 삶을 불러오고, 헛된 노력은 헛된 삶을 불러옵니다. 본질 앞에 장식적 과잉과 헛된 노력은 필요하지 않습니다.
피천득 선생은 "내 마음의 허공은 그대로 둘지언정 아무것으로나 채우지는 아니한다"고 하셨습니다. 이는 "공백은 비어 있는 곳이고, 여백은 바늘 하나 찌를 곳 없는 충만을 뜻한다"고 한 화가 이종상 선생의 말씀과 일맥상통합니다.
걱정은 돌 하나도 옮길 수 없다.
"걱정하지 마라, 어떻게든 된다."
'불가능이란 노력하지 않는 자의 변명이다'
부모는 활이고 자식은 화살이라고 했습니다. (중략) 부모는 어떠한 상황에서도 흔들리지 않는 활이 되어야 합니다. 부모의 삶의 태도는 곧 자신의 삶의 태도를 결정짓습니다.
천국을 맛보기 위해서는 네 가지 양념이 꼭 필요하다고 합니다. '단순함, 절제, 소박함, 작은 것에 만족함'
- 그의 산문집을 읽으면서 그의 질박한 솔직함이 글에 묻어나는 것을 느꼈다. 삶에 대한 그의 생각들을 여러 인용과 이야기들을 통해 쉽게 풀어나가면서도 삶에 용기를 주는 글들이 마음에 와 닿았다. 한국에서 한 번, 미국에 와서 다시 한 번 읽으면서, 사람이란 얼마나 그 때 그 때 이러한 정신적 양분이 필요한가를 새삼 느낀다. 조그만 머리 속에 들은 생각이라는 것이 시기, 비난, 경쟁, 욕심 등으로 뛰쳐나가지 않도록 좋은 말과 글로서 울타리를 쳐 주는 것이 언제나 필요한 듯 느껴진다. 그러기에 너무도 적합한 연초록의 울타리 같은 책.
사진을 찍으려면 천 번을 찍어라.
'마음속에 푸른 가지를 품고 있으면 새가 날아와 그곳에 앉는다'는 중국 속담
척박한 땅에 뿌리를 내리는 아카시아는 살아남으려고 가시를 먼저 틔웁니다. 그러다가 오랜 세월 동안 둥치가 굵어지면서 가시 없이도 생존할 수 있게 되면 그때서야 꽃을 피우고 꿀을 생산합니다.
가지와 줄기가 뒤틀렸다고 해서 꽃마저 아름답지 않은 나무는 없습니다. 절망과 고통을 지나며 홀로 베개에 눈물을 적셔본 자만이 별빛이 아름답다는 것을 알게 됩니다.
인생은 자기가 생각한 대로 된다.
'서둘러 걸으면 라싸에 도착할 수 없다'는 티베트 속담
분노는 열려 있는 모든 문을 닫고 인내는 닫혀 있는 모든 문을 엽니다.
마라톤 선수에게 가장 요구되는 것은 레이스 끝까지 최고의 스피드를 유지하는 지구력입니다. 그러기 위해서는 자기 페이스를 마지막까지 잃지 않는 것이 중요합니다.
그런 용무늬는 용목이라는 나무에 있는데 그런 이름의 나무가 따로 있는 것은 아닙니다. 그저 느티나무에서 간혹 발견될 뿐입니다.
용목은 사실 심하게 상처받은 나무입니다. 병이 깊어 제대로 자라지 못하고 몸의 한 부분이 옹이 지고 뒤틀린 나무입니다. 오랜 세월 가슴에 병을 품고 상처를 안으로만 다독이고 견디느라 다른 부분보다 더 단단해진 부분을 지닌 나무입니다. 말하자면 나무 안에서 자란 암 덩어리가 용무늬로 나타난 것입니다.
친구를 일컬어 '내 뼈를 묻어줄 사람, 내 관머리를 잡아줄 사람'으로 표현합니다.
하버드대 졸업장보다 독서하는 습관이 더 중요하다.
마이크로소프트사 창업주 빌 게이츠의 이 말은 독서의 중요성을 강조하는 데에 부족함이 없습니다. (중략)
"컴퓨터가 책을 완전히 대체할 수는 없다. 내가 살던 마을의 작은 도서관이 지금의 나를 만들었다"라고 말합니다.
밤하늘은 별을 사랑해도 자신을 온통 별로 채우지 않는다.
종이 한 장 자르는 데 도끼질하지 마라
과잉된 행위는 과잉된 삶을 불러오고, 헛된 노력은 헛된 삶을 불러옵니다. 본질 앞에 장식적 과잉과 헛된 노력은 필요하지 않습니다.
피천득 선생은 "내 마음의 허공은 그대로 둘지언정 아무것으로나 채우지는 아니한다"고 하셨습니다. 이는 "공백은 비어 있는 곳이고, 여백은 바늘 하나 찌를 곳 없는 충만을 뜻한다"고 한 화가 이종상 선생의 말씀과 일맥상통합니다.
걱정은 돌 하나도 옮길 수 없다.
"걱정하지 마라, 어떻게든 된다."
'불가능이란 노력하지 않는 자의 변명이다'
부모는 활이고 자식은 화살이라고 했습니다. (중략) 부모는 어떠한 상황에서도 흔들리지 않는 활이 되어야 합니다. 부모의 삶의 태도는 곧 자신의 삶의 태도를 결정짓습니다.
천국을 맛보기 위해서는 네 가지 양념이 꼭 필요하다고 합니다. '단순함, 절제, 소박함, 작은 것에 만족함'
- 그의 산문집을 읽으면서 그의 질박한 솔직함이 글에 묻어나는 것을 느꼈다. 삶에 대한 그의 생각들을 여러 인용과 이야기들을 통해 쉽게 풀어나가면서도 삶에 용기를 주는 글들이 마음에 와 닿았다. 한국에서 한 번, 미국에 와서 다시 한 번 읽으면서, 사람이란 얼마나 그 때 그 때 이러한 정신적 양분이 필요한가를 새삼 느낀다. 조그만 머리 속에 들은 생각이라는 것이 시기, 비난, 경쟁, 욕심 등으로 뛰쳐나가지 않도록 좋은 말과 글로서 울타리를 쳐 주는 것이 언제나 필요한 듯 느껴진다. 그러기에 너무도 적합한 연초록의 울타리 같은 책.
2014년 6월 20일 금요일
Arianna Huffington의 'Thrive' 중
we need Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.
the same dilemmas we are all facing - the stress of overbusyness, overworking, overconnecting on social media, and underconnecting with ourselves and with one another.
Dr. Seuss summed it up beautifully; "How did it get so late so soon?"
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
-Fr. Alfred D'Souza-
"Often, the very first things we give up are those that nourish us the most but seem 'optional'," wirte Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness:
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
-William James -
the ease which the big crises can wipe out the small ones that seemed so critical just a moment before.
And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling. "This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!"
And each day, it's up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, "No. This is what's important."
what's good for us as individuals is also good for businesses and for countries.
"Health is Wealth,"
"Ideas are like fish," wrote director and longtime meditator David Lynch in his book Catching the Big Fish. "If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're beautiful."
"The brain's alarm signals start to be triggered not only by the current scare, but by past threats and future worries...
"continuous partial attention" to describe the state of always being partly tuned into everything while never being completely tuned in to anything.
Given that we multitask now for most of our days, if now our lives,
So any tool that can increase our self-awareness and ability to listen and be in the moment is invaluable.
the better people are at taking care of themselves, the more effective they'll be in taking care of others, including their families, their coworkers, their communities, and their fellow citizens. When you're on an airplane you're told to "secure your own mask first before helping others," even your own child.
success is (skip) the quality of time we put in.
poor sleepers are seven times more likely to feel helpless and five times more likely to feel alone.
solvitur ambulando - "It is solved by walking." It refers to the fourth-century-BC greek philosopher Diogenes's response to the question of whether motion is real. To answer, he got up and walked. (skip)
In our culture of overwork, burnout, and exhaustion, how do we tap into our creativity, our wisdom, our capacity for wonder? Solvitur ambulando.
When I was growing up in Greece, my favorite poem was "Ithaka" by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.
Thomas Jefferson claimed the purpose of walking was to clear the mind of thoughts. (skip) For Henry David Thoreau, walking wasn't just a mean to an end; it was the end itself: "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise. . . but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day."
(skip)
"Methinks that the moment my legs being to move, my thoughts begin to flow,"
the children are usually the biggest casualties of a bad divorce.
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
- Carrie Fisher -
The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
The third-centry philosopher Plotinus wrote that there are three kinds of knowledge: "opinion, science, illumination. (skip) The Internet has made that first two types of knowledge very easy to come by. But it has taken us further away from that illumination, or wisdom, that is essential to living a life that matters.
that inner center in us that Marcus Aurelius called our "inner citadel."
But nobody can run fast enough to escape their own worries.
(- Mark Williams -)
writes David Brooks. "When making decisions about social relationships, it's foolish to swap the amazing machine in your skull for the crude machine on your desk," (skip) ours is a generation bloated with information and starved for wisdom.
Call it an iParadox: Our smartphones are actually blocking our path to wisdom.
Italians have other great traditions to draw from in preventing burnout: the riposo, the period of rest in the afternoon; and the evening stroll, the passeggiata, a time to disconnect from the pressures of the day.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego."
He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
- Cherokee Legend
spend two hours in a museum in front of a painting (skip) I was finally seeing one.
But when museums forget their DNA and get their heads turned by every new tech hottie that shimmies by, they undercut the point of their existence. Too much of the wrong kind of connection can actually disconnect us from an aesthetic experience.
No matter where you go, there you are.
- Buckaroo Banzai -
the serendipity of coincidence.
Where are our culture's preparations for leaving life with gratitude and grace?
"memento mori" - remember death, MM for short
Facing death means facing the ultimate question of the meaning of life. If we really want to live we must have the courage to recognize that life is ultimately very short, and that everything we do counts."
a "good death" is more likely if you have had a good life.
Here I was thinking that I had this wonderful gift that was not being recognized by the world. And then it dawned on me how many conditions I had put on my gift.
Our devices might seem like they're connecting us, and they do to a degree, but they're also disconnecting us from the world around us. And without being connected to the people we encounter, it's hard to activate our hardwired instinct for empathy.
When you become involved in the lives of children for whom drive-by shootings are a regular occurrence, where on out of three fathers is in jail, and where there isn't enough to eat, it's much harder to worry about how you look, whether you're wearing the right clothes, whether you're pretty enough, and how thing you are.
- Huffington Post의 창립자이자 대표, 편집장인 Arianna Huffington 의 생각을 담은 책. 그녀 자신의 삶과 생각이라기 보다는 그녀의 삶에 대한 생각을 중심으로 자신의 경험의 일부와 다른 많은 글들을 체계적으로 엮어 현대에 간과하고 있는 핵심적인 삶의 가치를 우리에게 보여주고 있는 책이다.
성공의 가치를 돈과 권력 (money and power) 라는 단순한 외형적인 부분에서 진정한 성공을 위해 필요한 세번째 요건을 Well-Being, Wisdom, Wonder, Giving이라는 주제로 제시하고 있다. 이 4개의 주제를 떠나서 점점 불행해지는 현대인을 보면서 어떠한 부분이 이 불행의 원인이 되는지를 파헤쳐 볼 필요가 있다고 생각된다. 과학의 발전이 가져온 생활의 편의라는 부분이 동시간대에 지구 반대편의 사람과 얼굴을 보면서 대화하는 것, 그 전에 고칠 수 없었던 병을 고치는 신약 개발, 집안을 청소해주는 로봇의 개발, 인터넷의 발전으로 인한 정보의 공유 혹은 전달 등을 의미한다면, 그에 따른 부작용들, 즉, 인구 과잉, 노인 인구의 증가에 따른 경제적 부담, 게임에 중독된 아이들, 더 힘들어진 죽음, 가정된 재해나 잔인한 영상 등으로 익숙해진 학습된 미래 공포 혹은 무감각, 미디어의 막강해진 권력에 의한 폐해 등을 꺼내어 살펴보아야 할 것이다. 이것이 과연 발전인가? 그리스 시대의 사람들이 누렸던 사색과 평안과 비교한다면 어느 쪽이 더 우월한 문명인가?
종교와 이념이 희박해진 현대에 와서 '과학의 발전'과 '이윤 창출'이라는 거대한 두 개의 명목아래 왜 인간의 삶은 더 복잡해지고, 더 감시받으며, 더 경쟁적이고, 더 고립되어지며, 더 피폐해지는 것일까? Huffington이 제시하고 있는 몇 개의 해답, 잘 자고, 잘 먹고, 현명하게 제한적으로 필요에 의해 과학 기술을 이용하고, 죽음에 대한 생각을 가지고 삶을 더 소중하게 살고, 다른 이를 생각하며 사는 것. 이들이 궁극적 해답이라고 볼 수는 없으나 현대 사회에서 자신을 지켜나가는 좋은 방법 중에 하나라는 생각이 든다. 또한 그녀가 미디어를 통해 끊임없이 이러한 부분의 중요성을 사람들에게 제시하는 것, 비극적/자극적 뉴스만 난무하는 미디어의 세상에서 생각과 마음을 쉬어가고 충전할 수 있는 조그마한 미디어의 숲을 만들어 준 것 같아 감사한 마음이다.
the same dilemmas we are all facing - the stress of overbusyness, overworking, overconnecting on social media, and underconnecting with ourselves and with one another.
Dr. Seuss summed it up beautifully; "How did it get so late so soon?"
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
-Fr. Alfred D'Souza-
"Often, the very first things we give up are those that nourish us the most but seem 'optional'," wirte Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness:
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
-William James -
the ease which the big crises can wipe out the small ones that seemed so critical just a moment before.
And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling. "This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!"
And each day, it's up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, "No. This is what's important."
what's good for us as individuals is also good for businesses and for countries.
"Health is Wealth,"
"Ideas are like fish," wrote director and longtime meditator David Lynch in his book Catching the Big Fish. "If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're beautiful."
"The brain's alarm signals start to be triggered not only by the current scare, but by past threats and future worries...
"continuous partial attention" to describe the state of always being partly tuned into everything while never being completely tuned in to anything.
Given that we multitask now for most of our days, if now our lives,
So any tool that can increase our self-awareness and ability to listen and be in the moment is invaluable.
the better people are at taking care of themselves, the more effective they'll be in taking care of others, including their families, their coworkers, their communities, and their fellow citizens. When you're on an airplane you're told to "secure your own mask first before helping others," even your own child.
success is (skip) the quality of time we put in.
poor sleepers are seven times more likely to feel helpless and five times more likely to feel alone.
solvitur ambulando - "It is solved by walking." It refers to the fourth-century-BC greek philosopher Diogenes's response to the question of whether motion is real. To answer, he got up and walked. (skip)
In our culture of overwork, burnout, and exhaustion, how do we tap into our creativity, our wisdom, our capacity for wonder? Solvitur ambulando.
When I was growing up in Greece, my favorite poem was "Ithaka" by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.
Thomas Jefferson claimed the purpose of walking was to clear the mind of thoughts. (skip) For Henry David Thoreau, walking wasn't just a mean to an end; it was the end itself: "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise. . . but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day."
(skip)
"Methinks that the moment my legs being to move, my thoughts begin to flow,"
the children are usually the biggest casualties of a bad divorce.
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
- Carrie Fisher -
The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
The third-centry philosopher Plotinus wrote that there are three kinds of knowledge: "opinion, science, illumination. (skip) The Internet has made that first two types of knowledge very easy to come by. But it has taken us further away from that illumination, or wisdom, that is essential to living a life that matters.
that inner center in us that Marcus Aurelius called our "inner citadel."
But nobody can run fast enough to escape their own worries.
(- Mark Williams -)
writes David Brooks. "When making decisions about social relationships, it's foolish to swap the amazing machine in your skull for the crude machine on your desk," (skip) ours is a generation bloated with information and starved for wisdom.
Call it an iParadox: Our smartphones are actually blocking our path to wisdom.
Italians have other great traditions to draw from in preventing burnout: the riposo, the period of rest in the afternoon; and the evening stroll, the passeggiata, a time to disconnect from the pressures of the day.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego."
He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
- Cherokee Legend
spend two hours in a museum in front of a painting (skip) I was finally seeing one.
But when museums forget their DNA and get their heads turned by every new tech hottie that shimmies by, they undercut the point of their existence. Too much of the wrong kind of connection can actually disconnect us from an aesthetic experience.
No matter where you go, there you are.
- Buckaroo Banzai -
the serendipity of coincidence.
Where are our culture's preparations for leaving life with gratitude and grace?
"memento mori" - remember death, MM for short
Facing death means facing the ultimate question of the meaning of life. If we really want to live we must have the courage to recognize that life is ultimately very short, and that everything we do counts."
a "good death" is more likely if you have had a good life.
Here I was thinking that I had this wonderful gift that was not being recognized by the world. And then it dawned on me how many conditions I had put on my gift.
Our devices might seem like they're connecting us, and they do to a degree, but they're also disconnecting us from the world around us. And without being connected to the people we encounter, it's hard to activate our hardwired instinct for empathy.
When you become involved in the lives of children for whom drive-by shootings are a regular occurrence, where on out of three fathers is in jail, and where there isn't enough to eat, it's much harder to worry about how you look, whether you're wearing the right clothes, whether you're pretty enough, and how thing you are.
- Huffington Post의 창립자이자 대표, 편집장인 Arianna Huffington 의 생각을 담은 책. 그녀 자신의 삶과 생각이라기 보다는 그녀의 삶에 대한 생각을 중심으로 자신의 경험의 일부와 다른 많은 글들을 체계적으로 엮어 현대에 간과하고 있는 핵심적인 삶의 가치를 우리에게 보여주고 있는 책이다.
성공의 가치를 돈과 권력 (money and power) 라는 단순한 외형적인 부분에서 진정한 성공을 위해 필요한 세번째 요건을 Well-Being, Wisdom, Wonder, Giving이라는 주제로 제시하고 있다. 이 4개의 주제를 떠나서 점점 불행해지는 현대인을 보면서 어떠한 부분이 이 불행의 원인이 되는지를 파헤쳐 볼 필요가 있다고 생각된다. 과학의 발전이 가져온 생활의 편의라는 부분이 동시간대에 지구 반대편의 사람과 얼굴을 보면서 대화하는 것, 그 전에 고칠 수 없었던 병을 고치는 신약 개발, 집안을 청소해주는 로봇의 개발, 인터넷의 발전으로 인한 정보의 공유 혹은 전달 등을 의미한다면, 그에 따른 부작용들, 즉, 인구 과잉, 노인 인구의 증가에 따른 경제적 부담, 게임에 중독된 아이들, 더 힘들어진 죽음, 가정된 재해나 잔인한 영상 등으로 익숙해진 학습된 미래 공포 혹은 무감각, 미디어의 막강해진 권력에 의한 폐해 등을 꺼내어 살펴보아야 할 것이다. 이것이 과연 발전인가? 그리스 시대의 사람들이 누렸던 사색과 평안과 비교한다면 어느 쪽이 더 우월한 문명인가?
종교와 이념이 희박해진 현대에 와서 '과학의 발전'과 '이윤 창출'이라는 거대한 두 개의 명목아래 왜 인간의 삶은 더 복잡해지고, 더 감시받으며, 더 경쟁적이고, 더 고립되어지며, 더 피폐해지는 것일까? Huffington이 제시하고 있는 몇 개의 해답, 잘 자고, 잘 먹고, 현명하게 제한적으로 필요에 의해 과학 기술을 이용하고, 죽음에 대한 생각을 가지고 삶을 더 소중하게 살고, 다른 이를 생각하며 사는 것. 이들이 궁극적 해답이라고 볼 수는 없으나 현대 사회에서 자신을 지켜나가는 좋은 방법 중에 하나라는 생각이 든다. 또한 그녀가 미디어를 통해 끊임없이 이러한 부분의 중요성을 사람들에게 제시하는 것, 비극적/자극적 뉴스만 난무하는 미디어의 세상에서 생각과 마음을 쉬어가고 충전할 수 있는 조그마한 미디어의 숲을 만들어 준 것 같아 감사한 마음이다.
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