Updates from Our Friends
John C. Wright’s latest.
John C. Wright is Captain Kirk passionately convinced he is a Vulcan.
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This idea of ‘immersion’ in life; of life as unselfconscious – of living in the world as given and joyfully embraced – was at the back of most of these pleasant, yearning, day-dreams.
This bears a more-than-coincidental relationship to similar day-dreams of early childhood; where I can remember some of what it was like to be a happy child in a happy family, in the years before I was five. For instance; Christmas day aged three or four was a total and immersive experience of being swept along in colour, warmth, joy and unfolding excitement. My life in early childhood – when it was good – was good without comparison; it was living in the best possible world.
When, from the late 1990s, I began to read accounts of the life of ‘simple’, nomadic, foraging, hunter-gatherer societies; it was impossible to miss the similarity with childhood – which was indeed often pointed-out by anthropologists (before the cancer of leftism utterly destroyed their capacity to experience and think).
Yet, although there was intense nostalgia for states of being; I could seldom whole-heartedly take the inward step of wanting actually to live in any previous state of society – in the sense that I could not imagine me-as-I-am-now, finding life better in any past society as-it-was-then.
For the daydream to work properly, I would have to be a different person from the modern Man I had become.
Much more at the link.
This is interesting enough in itself. But for me its more, because I feel that he is describing from a different angle something that I deeply feel we are also approaching from our study of virtue sets. The difference between being a little child and becoming as a little child and the extent to which becoming is the purpose of all of this.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
E.C.
August 12, 2022
My favorite Institute teacher described this state as ‘simplicity beyond complexity’. He said that no one wants to *stay* in a state of innocence for very long, because it cannot satisfy, nor to wander in complexities forever, because they ultimately weary the soul; someday, we yearn for the simplicity on the other side of the complexity of life, and once we attain that state, we will have the joy that God gives to all who endure to the end.
G.
August 12, 2022
Good. May his tribe increase.
E.C.
August 12, 2022
Oh, I’m quite sure it will, both literally and metaphorically. He has 10 children, all nearly grown, and has moved to California to become the area director over the seminaries and institutes there, with the intention of ‘converting the heathen’, as he said before he left, with an ear-to-ear grin.
He, like the Nephites, has the gift of speech, and he uses it wholeheartedly to teach the Gospel. He could quote chapter and verse of not only the scriptures, but most talks given in the last 20 years, plus he was an historian of Church history who had read many primary source documents. He backed up everything he taught with footnotes, and told every class to verify what he was teaching through their own research, and come back with follow-up questions. His life is intensely Christ-focused, and he would testify of his Savior at the slightest provocation. Gosh, I miss him.
G.
August 12, 2022
I can see why