Humility

This new book was reviewed in the Times yesterday. It does put things in perspective, it should remind us to identify with something larger than our personal, solitary, finite, temporary selves.

"Picture yourself on a plane, at high altitude. One of the engines has just caught fire, the other doesn't look very promising, and the pilot has to make an emergency landing. Finding yourself in such a situation is no doubt shattering, but also illuminating. At first, amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you cannot think in any detached, rational fashion. You have to admit it, you are paralyzed by fear and scared to death, just like everyone else.

Eventually, the plane lands safely, and everybody gets off unharmed. Once you've had a chance to pull yourself together, you can think a bit more clearly about what just happened. And you start learning from it.

You learn, for instance, that human existence is something that happens, briefly, between two instantiations of nothingness. Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly. "A brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," as Vladimir Nabokov would have it. 1

These are the brutal facts of the human condition—the rest is embellishment. No matter how we choose to reframe or retell the facts, when we consider what precedes us and what follows us, we are not much to talk about. We are next to nothing, in fact. And much of what we do in life, whether we know it or not, is an effort to address the sickness that comes from the realization of this next-to-nothingness. Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature—they seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable."
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— In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility by Costica Bradatan
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