lack of xanga activity should be noted as a combination of lent (unusually turbulent this year) and owl weekend (referrring to a big preview event at rice that i coordinated). lack of posting also indicates lack of reading. i hate feeling behind on the lives of my friends… but i’ll be done with this job soon, and with that (i pray) will come more time for my actual life *priorities* (i’m still defining those, but they definitely include my friends and families, top o’ the list).
ANYWAY, i wrote an email last night to my dear friend olivia (my role model for life adventure) and included this quote from c.s. lewis (see below). so far, it has come the closest to “defining” what i have been experiencing lately… searching for… stumbling around… mystified by…
even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of– something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side?� are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of the something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?� you have never *had* it. all the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it– tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.� but if it should really become manifest– if there ever came an echo that did not die but swelled into the sound itself– you would know it.� beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “here at last is the thing i was made for.”� we cannot tell each other about it.� it is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.� while we are, this is. if we lose this, we lose all.
�
i am haunted by those echoes, echoes of sounds i have not heard in a long, long time. i hunger for more glimpses… i need to shed all shreds of pride and silence all meaningless noise, those commercial jingles for my own selfishness, and drop down with my ear pressed tightly to the ground,�grinding against dirt and cigarette butts and gritty shards of glasses, straining to hear, to listen, to catch those whispers of beauty, whispers from god.
0 Responses to “Wednesday April 21, 2004 at 05:00 pm”