Dwelling With John Gray

Bah! I love reading John Gray.

The Immortalization Commission is arousing all the perfect emotions in me. These stories about lovers in the late late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century, grappling with the newly realized finality of death.

We are going to die. Fair enough. But is there any hope that we can learn to rationally direct this finite (read doomed) human life? Is there any hope for thought? Is there any hope for love and hope and choice? Unlikely.

This is exactly the problem I am having with my life.

I had a plan and that plan no longer feels viable.

The hole in my heart is not a graduate school shaped hole.

So how can I rationally direct my life? How can I begin to make choices when I'm so overwhelmed by my emotions? By my desire to be involved with people? Where is my freedom? What choices am I to make?

Reading about H.G. Wells, F.W.H Myers, Arthur Balfour, and others, is really helping me cope. These men dealt with these same problems. They were dealing with Darwinian anxiety, the stress brought about by the conclusions of scientific materialism.

But they were dealing with it as a brand new conclusion, as an unprecedented intellectual reality that compromised their deepest emotional convictions.

At least I was raised as a scientific materialist. At least these conclusions weren't thrust upon me in my adult life. I struggle with them to this day. I can't imagine what they would do to me if I had learned of them in the time and place they did.

Heidegger, too, is helping me deal with these questions.

I tried to read his essay 'The Thing' and it didn't make any sense to me. But 'Building Dwelling Thinking' made a bit more sense to me.

It gave me a sense of comfort in Being. It made me feel okay with just Being. It makes me feel okay with accepting the state of my Being. If I can just learn to dwell, on the Earth, in my life, then my life will take care of itself.

If I can just relax and release, I will build my life organically.

The plan has collapsed. The plan is not viable.

Relax.

Let dwelling take care of your building.

This morning I spent a bit of time in a coffee shop, drinking coffee, and reading Gray.

I intend to spend a lot of this fall and winter posted up in coffee shops.

Dwelling, thinking, being in public, building my life.