This blog is in trouble -- somewhere in the process of deleting files to free up storage space, I severed a vital link that connects my pictures to their source. I don't know if I can fix it, but I'm trying.
Meanwhile, a thought from the 11th century:
“The man who finds his country sweet is only a raw beginner;
the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man
for whom the whole world is as a foreign country is perfect.”
-Hugh of St. Victor (medieval Saxon cleric)
This wording comes to us from Edward Said, who famously argued with us to quit "orientalizing" the other. A larger quote exists which might give deeper insight to the excerpt above.
“It is therefore, a source of
great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about
in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave
them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is a tender
beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he
is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has
fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his
love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”
*
I don't mind telling you that wisdom comes hard to me. To those of you graced with an indelible point of view, I probably seem simple and blind.
Why can't she see what is so obvious to me? I don't know why I can't agree with you. Probably because you're so sure, and I don't trust that. You make sense, sometimes. But in many cases, that is my greatest challenge: I think I
do see. The problem is that I also see the contrary point of view, and I find I relate to both. To all three. To ...
all-of-it.
And that could be the reason I take interest, and find comfort, in those lines by old Hugh. Maybe when I feel the most lost I am really acting out some necessary plot in my own discrete, but connected, existence.
I dunno. Mebbe.
In any case, I claim the privilege to be this person. Fold it up with the rest of the scraps of my personal manifesto, and tuck them away. The final draft will most likely never be written.
