I've been reading Howard's End for about a month now, picking it up whenever I can justify taking an hour or two away from writing papers, and wow that Forster dude sure had some interesting things to say. Here's a passage about the tragedy of preparedness. I could cut it down for you guys, but I can't help myself...
"Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead to nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumed that preparation against danger is in itself good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."
Those last two sentences just get me every time.
7 comments:
Awesome, yet I am not as concrete in this opinion, as I can still say:
Wow, life, what a terrible beauty.
It is a hill, and we shall climb, but what a view.
:)
Nice stuff. I would say, from my small knowledge of Japanese literature, that they too know of the tragedy of preparedness.
So what is the tragedy of preparedness as you see it?
The fact that planning takes some joy out of life, if not all?
Or that we have to be prepared, as we have no choice, but it's a waste, as things generally result in terms of the lot that one is presented with at any given moment?
Hope the last one made sense.
Thanks for sharing that Renamaphone. Just beautiful.
I think that perhaps the tragedy of preparedness is that heavy armour we "stagger" around with, the preparation for adversaries, battles and disappointmennts. These comical, burdened, tentative individuals; parodies of ourselves?
We waste a lot of energy trying to prepare and protect ourselves from hurt, when in fact we often never face foes at all. Parallels to the windmills in Don Quixote I think.
Romance hurts, love hurts, life hurts and I know I often try to outwit that hurt, and it's the risk you take to feel something beautiful even for just a little while. It can all end and leave you lying on the floor but the real trick is to get up again and have the courage to keep wanting more of that romance.
I think the tragedy is in all the things you miss as you are focused on the (near or distant) future. You want to be ready for what you anticipate, but usually we anticipate the wrong things and don't notice what's really going on around us.
Mind you, it does take preparation of a sort to keep yourself 'in the moment', but that seems to me to be something other than what we're talking about here.
I agree, I think the focus is a big part of the tragedy. We often anticipate living rather than actually living it.
not a battle, but a romance.
douglas coupland once wrote about a parrot who learned all these words, like hundreds of them-- his comment was that it struck him how hard it is to learn anything, and even then there's no guarantee you'll ever use it.
strive mightily, willie shakespeare says, but eat and drink as friends.
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