Contra my last post

I finally finished the 127 hours of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire this week, and started William Jame’s “Varieties of Religious Experience”.  I have a major intellectual crush on James.  The clarity of his thought and exposition, the honesty and rigor of his approach, and his genuine humaneness and concern for the humanity of his subject, are all thoroughly entrancing for me.

To the point here, he quoted a Frenchman–Bernaud, I believe was his name–as saying “Good humor is that philosophical stance which seems to say to Nature that we take it no more seriously than it takes us.”

It is amazing how fast moods and emotions pass once they are entered into honestly. It FEELS like emotion has a logic and a terminus, that certain states are bound to last, that the next states can reliably be inferred, and that we “know where this is going”.  We know nothing of the sort.  Great exultations can come immediately out of great melancholies, and LAST.  For a time, at least.  Then we–I–can laugh at the foolishness of the whole thing. Storms, however intense, blow over.

Emotions do clearly have a logic, which is tied to thought–which can both amplify and diminish them–but one must always grasp that the logic can only be appreciated AFTER a change which was completely unexpected.  A leads to B, and B leads to F, which leads to 7, after which Hummus and the color orange.

The constant is a patient connection to them.  If we live in a “sea of mood and emotion” as some song puts it, the task is to learn to swim. I believe I have said this before.  Now I have said it again.  I forget myself.

I don’t know why I live in these places, at times.  It is so odd, so different.   But it is my path.  I have no idea where it is going, and this is OK.