Romantic Escapades
Bruce Charlton’s latest struck a deep chord in me.
This may seem the least ‘romantic‘ of times – and certainly it is the intention of those with power and wealth to make it so. They intend to make life a purely ‘material’ thing; with all that may be considered mystical, spiritual or magical excluded from significant discourse as being unreal, ridiculous and dangerous.
But this very fact makes these times potentially of the greatest possible romantic significance.
-thus Bruce Charlton. Read the whole thing.
Though my life is to all outward appearances a fairly conventional one of a married father raising his children and keeping his lawn mowed, on the inside I live a life of panache and derring do. I am this way on the inside not despite the outside, but because of it. Standing as father to my kids has been the great adventure of my life.
I have tried to capture this sense in three of my favorite posts.
And the third one I can’t find. Its about driving my kids a hundred miles or more for church youth activities, in my mind sallying all over the countryside to do down the devil.
I can afford to say things like this because no one believes me. I am a purloined adventurer.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
Don Quixote
October 14, 2022
To dream … the impossible dream …
To fight … the unbeatable foe …
To bear … with unbearable sorrow …
To run … where the brave dare not go …
To right … the unrightable wrong …
To love … pure and chaste from afar …
To try … when your arms are too weary …
To reach … the unreachable star …
This is my quest, to follow that star …
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far …
To fight for the right, without question or pause …
To be willing to march into Hell, for a Heavenly cause …
And I know if I’ll only be true, to this glorious quest,
That my heart will lie will lie peaceful and calm,
when I’m laid to my rest …
And the world will be better for this:
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove, with his last ounce of courage,
To reach … the unreachable star …
[]
October 16, 2022
The portrayal of domestic life as a grand adventure is a good metaphor, and many of the virtues needed for both are the same, and potentially you could view the dangers facing prosperous contemporary middle-class American life as similar in a more long-term and spiritual sense as the dangers found in war and exploration…
But it’s not. It’s a totally different thing. It’s the thing that many men seeking adventure found themselves seeking, a place of rest once they’d found their fortune, a farm to escape to, a Shire if you will.
One of Boyd K. Packer’s most memorable lines was “Most men, by nature, seek adventure.” This was presented as a *contrast* to the need for a family life. It’s in the masculine blueprint to want panache and derring-do, to become really good at dangerous things and have people look at you in awe, and that’s a force that good civilizations balance and unbalanced civilizations, eventually, get balanced by.
A lot of men, a LOT of men, especially in this weird age, feel disappointed that they never had an adventure, that they never joined the Army or their Army tour was disappointing, that space exploration isn’t happening and the world is mapped and organized crime doesn’t seem to have God’s approval, and so they went straight from callow youth to retired to the farm with the family and feel like they never earned it. I think if the vicissitudes of domestic life really were only different from the Shackleton expedition by degree we wouldn’t feel the need to comfort ourselves with that – and we also would not be comforted by domestic life! It wouldn’t be a reward!
This is not to say that domestic life can’t be exciting or have exciting things happening, but they’re different, orderly, civilized; children who learn to handle minor crises will be able to handle major crises if those occur.
And they will occur. The Lord at times allows men to have fatherhood as their life’s great adventure, and their sons to have fatherhood as THEIR life’s great adventure, and lays up in store in this manner, but there are fewer fathers now, and fewer that can see the adventure in it, and the days of real adventure are at our doors – the hunger days, the danger days, the honor days, and every noble deed today makes the need for noble deeds then a little less desperate. We are gathering for a siege, and need not envy the time when we will be manning the walls.
G.
October 17, 2022
[],
I sympathize with your point and in other moods I could have written everything you did.
but in this mood, I think you are wrong. Its not a metaphor.
It requires pluck these days. Spiritual death assails you.
[]
October 17, 2022
Being a failed divorced deadbeat dad assails you, which is a numb, lingering sort of hell. Mere danger does not make an adventure, though.
I just worry for the families that maybe could have truly gone beyond, could have moved everyone into a school bus and followed a prophecy into the wilderness, but locked themselves up in this idea that doing a normal thing – and it is a normal thing! no matter how many other people don’t do it, no matter how above their peers they might be, it is normal, it is the baseline standard – is doing an extraordinary thing. Because we need extraordinary things now more than ever, just as we need normal things now more than ever.
G.
October 18, 2022
Superb response. 100%. To this comment let all other comments bow down.