"Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings."
-----Robinson Jeffers
"A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things....
Friendship is another form of love -- more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.
Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these."
-----Ansel Adams, in a letter to his friend, Cedric Wright, June 10th 1937
1 comment:
Nice AA quote. I've come to realize that for a relationship to be meaningful in life, ultimately, it must be based on charity: the 'transmitting and accepting', but mainly the transmitting or the giving of one's self to another. It's the closest we can get to reality. In a world of sin and self-centeredness, love only makes sense through continual giving and self-sacrifice; to become incarnate in our lives, as it were, love must take the form of the cross.
On the other hand, "human kind cannot bear very much reality". Love in its fullness -- the recurrent pain of dying to one's self -- can be pretty unbearable. Friendship is one of the easier relationships (or forms of love) because it incorporates this in a passive sort of way, as Adams says. Marriage is probably the most difficult because the true and unbearable nature of love is out in the open, confronted on a daily basis. But friendship, again, should rest on the same foundation. When your friend is in trouble or need, you are there for him and give of yourself for his sake. A 'real friend' is charitable, even when it's inconvenient or unpleasant.
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