2006
January 1st, 2007
I can remember exactly when I conceived on of the most important ideas of this year. It was on the bus looking out over the yellow Autumn fields of wheat, when the sun was still strong enough to create dapples of shade on the ground, so that when the wind ripped through the fields the wheat looked like a swelling sea.
The word that has kept with me ever since was iconoclastic–to live as an iconoclast. Attacking the things which you recognise in yourself and others as being built upon false pretenses. Thinking not only about what you are doing, but why you are doing it.
When I came back from Austria I was so incensed that I forgot about recollecting my thoughts and experiences of the trip. I felt an overwhelming urge to attack one of the most venerated institutions in modern civilisation: the education system. I wish I could have dwelled instead on some of the most happiest memories I have of the year.
I now keep a little diary, it acts as a buffer between my mind and what I write about here. It’s saturated with personal things of the utmost importance, but those which matter only to me. This year those are the gentle feelings that have brought perspective to days when they have seemed like an unending stream of compromise. Sometimes the perspective helped, sometimes it didn’t.
I generally find gazing into the future tiresome, especially when you are forced to do it by others. But it can’t be denied that 2007 is set to have the most paths trodden on. I was in touch with an old friend recently who expressed a dislike in being made to chose a path from she saw as limiting crossroads. I quote the following, even if it does give the impression that I’ve only read one book all year:
The entire surface of consciousness […] has to be kept clear of any great imperatives. Even the grand words, the grand attitudes must be guarded against! All of them represent a danger that the instinct will “understand itself” too early–In the meantime the organising “idea” destined to rule grows and grows in the depths–it begins to command, it slowly leads back from the sidepaths and wrong turnings, it prepares individual qualities and abilities which will one day prove themselves indispensable as means to achieving the whole–it constructs ancillary capacities one after the other before it gives any hint of the dominating task, of the “goal”, “objective”, “meaning”.
–”Why I Am So Wise” by Friedrich Nietzche
January 2nd, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Those mountains in the background are very purty… and you look like you’re pondering as to how you shoul take over the world.