I have long been fond of Zippo lighters. They are an iconic brand, and I’ve had a few over the years. I have two now. I just bought one in Gatlinburg, a Buddha one in a cigar store run by Indians. There may be a pun there somewhere. I have another one I’ve used for some years. I like to smoke cigars on long drives.
My brain being the continuous non sequitur engine that it is–or perhaps non-obvious connection engine–I was filling my new Zippo just now and getting flashbacks to WW2, then thinking about the smells, the smokes, and the rest periods for our combat troops.
Then it hit me: for a lot of these guys, the end of combat probably feels like a LET DOWN. Yes, it is hard, and they suffer, and they watch their friends die and get seriously wounded, and all the other things that happen in combat. But some part of them feels let down when the orders come that the fighting is done, and they are to report somewhere to get on a plane or a ship and heading home, never to be in uniform again.
And manifestly many of them spend much of the rest of their lives remembering that time, and no doubt over some period of time romanticizing it to the point of misremembering it.
It is so hard to know what matters. It is so hard to know what “good times” are and “bad times”. We live in confusion. All of us. You have to try and not be confused, and you have to spend most of your time feeling like you have a good plan and know what you are talking about, but from time to time you need to laugh or cry or both and say “fuck if I know.”
Experience feels real. We know that much, and that includes the experience of thinking.
I am continuing by the way to listen to William James Principles of Psychology. It is the most “grundlich” treatment of existential or phenomenological psychology I have encountered. He spends much time and goes into great detail trying to figure out what an ego or an I or a self is. A student of Buddhist psychology could do worse than to read through his meditations.