 
                         20060621.00

     It surprises me each summer how quickly, how early, how
soon the longest day of summer appears, and how and is then
behind, and the days grow shorter once more and darkness
settles inexorably over the landscapes before one has had the
opportunity fully to savor the light. Reminiscent of life
itself.

     Implicit in my account of a book that I have read, in
this case, Sandor Marai Die Glut, or in its English version,
Embers, is that not only that the printed words on the bound
pages remain unaltered, one and the same, but also that the
mind which reads and absorbs them is steady, realiable and
unchanging.

     But this last proposition is surely untrue, if only
because the very process of reading changes the mind, but
because even independent of the text, and particularly so,
because the text would have a steadying influence, the mind
is in flux, tossed like a vessel on the waves of memory,
caught in currents of emotion, and tossed by unpredictable
storms.

     Consequently to evaluate, to assess an idea is somewhat
like measuring the angular declination of a star. When the
observer's platform is tossing on the waves, multiple
readings will be required before the acquired data can be
accepted as meaningful.

     But then the single unambiguous meaning insisted upon is
perhaps it itself an artifact. For reasons bearing on my own
spiritual identity, I demand that the world in which I see
myself mirrored should be unique.  But it isn't.

     It is on account of the required identity of self, that
I postulate uniqueness in my heroes and in my gods.
Uniqueness in the friend with whom I communicate, uniqueness
in the works of art by which I live and which I worship. But
the fact is that each flower, each leaf on the tree in front
of my window is both unique, and yet one is of thousands.
The same is true of books, of poems, of songs, of musical
compositions.

     Marai says that with friendship or love one takes an
individual out of the world for oneself. I suspect this
assumption is symptomatic of emotional, of spiritual illness.
Or is it realistic? If friendship, - to leave it at that, -
entails the friends' spending time with each other, devoting
their thoughts, their energies to one another, then indeed
they may, as a practical matter, be taking each other out of
social circulation, out of society, out of the social world;
simply because one can converse only with one person at a
time, and the number of hours in the day are limited. Might
this consideration also yield an explanation for monogamy?

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
