I got drunk and watched the sunrise from the top of a hill.
In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea — the getting drunk part — because I had to work the next morning in the valley with the sun and the dust and on normal days it was enough to make me hate living but with a hangover it would be disasterous.
By some miracle, the god didn't give me a hangover. I worked from morning until the evening, and life was fine- but on the hill I had a dream, a dream of a song that I could sing but couldn't hear, and I'd like to have been able to write it down. But maybe there weren't any words, I can't remember, I was drunk. And some things weren't meant to endure, to be etched into stone, worn down and killed. But it would have been nice to... I got drunk my first night at college.
Because, you know, you're not really drunk until you start impersonating dead writers at a frat party. In retrospect it's probably a miracle I wasn't killed, but then again I was young and being young allows you to get away with being just a little bit invincible, give or take.
Maybe you've begun to detect a pattern.
Every day since, more or less.
Hegel told me once that "Just as the arts of outward life, the accumulated skill and invention, the customs and arrangements of social and political life, are the result of the thought, care, and needs, of the want and the misery, of the ingenuity, the plans and achievements of those who preceded us in history, so, likewise, in science, and especially in philosophy, do we owe what we are to the tradition which, as Herder has put it, like a holy chain, runs through all that is transient, and has therefore passed away." (emph. added)
If we believe in the Spirit, then from this fragment we know that the Spirit moved through Herder in this one moment, out of his entire lifetime — and in fact that his entire life was intended by the Spirit so that he could make this one simile, so that Hegel might read it out of everything in the twelve volumes of Zur Philosophie und Geschichte and include it in his introductory lectures on the history of philosophy.
Because, seriously, nobody knows or cares who Herder was, who Hegel was. But yet the image is persistent. It is a holy chain that binds us radical dreamers and our radical ideas. Even you, the ones who have already gone: you are already bound to the holy chain.
This remained unlinked for quite some time because, after all, I was being a transcendentarrrrrist and I couldn't rightfully link to something, implicitly saying that there is some necessity on my part to link to you, if after all you're already bound to me. There can't be any effort on my part to make the binding.
But this is everything, and peer pressure is thicker than moral imperative. |
