[lit-ideas] Re: you decide
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:10:47 -0700
Mike Geary wrote
Calling all philosophers and philanderers and fishing buddies and all
those who are full of opinions if not facts. I read this quote
recently: "Story-telling is the best protection we have against
forgetting the spiritual interior of our lives." (Barry Lopez).
What I want to know from you higher intellects is whether you think
this statement (as it stands) has any merit in truthiness or is it
(lacking any further elaboration or supportive propositions or
historical evidence) just a pledge of alliegance? I suspect the
latter though I support the former in a kind of prima facie kind of
thingie. I'm glad I'm not really smart. I'd doubt I could stand up
to doubting everything about myself, though, no doubt, I should.
I didn't know we were in danger of forgetting the spiritual interior of
our lives. I mean, nobody's ever told me to watch out because I was in
danger of losing the spiritual interior of my life as if
it were my school lunch money or my senses or my mind (if these are
different; JL would know), so there's either a huge gap in my interior
self because some spiritual something is completely missing, as if it
were the name of the first girl I ever kissed, or it---this spiritual
something---is there but only tenuously; but then I realize Barry Lopez
is referring to the spiritual interior itself, which is not the kind of
thing---or wouldn't appear to be---that's /in/ anything. Except our
lives. So, maybe he's referring clumsily to an 'aspect,' or a 'part' of
our lives, namely, the spiritual; and if he is, why doesn't he just say
so instead of suggesting unhelpfully that our lives are made up of
various interiors, like Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont's former estate on Long Island
http://www.ligoldcoast.com/liruins.html
to which I'd need keys, which I'll bet are somewhere on my spiritual
exterior or behind the couch or in the dog's pile of Guarded Things.
Anyway, out of reach.
As for story-telling, there's a difference between Aesop's fables and
Faulkner's 'The Bear,' and between both of them and the performance of a
Greek rhapsode or Isaiah's prophecy that
Babylon would be overthrown.
Which gets us no closer.
Robert Paul
Mutton College
Sheepskin, Nebraska
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