It's a funny way of saying something serious and true. Our time is short, even at the outside.* We don't need to waste it, whether in frivolity or undue solemnity. We should want to ameliorate the world but also to luxuriate in the precious privilege of getting to exist at all. Just consider the immense improbability that any one of us would ever even have been born. We will do just that in class tomorrow, when we take up Steven Pinker's chapter on probability. I'll probably mention Alan Lightman's Probable Impossibilities, Richard Dawkins' meditation on our good luck ("We are going to die...") and Maria Popova's complementary appreciation of White's humanism.
I've never quoted the line just preceding White's morning conundrum, but it sharpens and deepens the point: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem." But it's both, so we must be hedonists of a sort as well as meliorists.
Hedonists of the sort, I mean, who understand that the experience of pleasure and delight is a universal birthright not to be hoarded but expanded. The good and happy times we want for ourselves we must rationally want for all. That was John Dewey's rationale for insisting on what the "best and wisest parent" wants for all children in the sphere of education. Learning is not preparation for life, he said, but life itself. Let us not squander it. Improve AND enjoy. That's what you do, if you love life.
White also said:
While we're here we should try to do some good, have some fun, and “always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
E.B. White was *Roger Angell's stepdad. Some family.
No comments:
Post a Comment