Questions owed myself

[lhexa]

Skill is needed in crafting anything, but a live idea is an animal to be caught, and I am sometimes a resourceful enough hunter. Let the feeling of pursuit, the sense that here is an activity of living things, be something that characterizes my writing, not the ease of long training, the impression that the prose at last presented was written many times before, albeit never so well as now.

I've come to wonder why I give such respect to my dreams, greedy things that they are. Often I feel I want to inflict myself on the world. Philosophy itself has history enough of arrogance and imposition, its ideals of truth, and means of investigation, being with rare exception meant to stand above all else. So it is with me, despite a distrust for philosophy's weakness, systematization. I want to reveal, inspire, and challenge... anything and everything! ...but even more I want to be the person who revealed, inspired, and challenged. In one's dreams, the audience is a large one, and the dreamer essentially apart from it, above or in front of it. And in pursuing my dreams, in having seen some of what they entail, I've come to ask myself why the person in that favored position ought to be me. Questions addressed to, and owed to myself: Why are you so often resistant to being touched emotionally, being inspired? Why do you shy from debates, even philosophical ones, nowadays? Why are you so apolitical, so quietist? Why do you want to write what you cannot bring yourself to say? Why did you fail at philosophy?

It does not dismay me that tomorrow will be as today. However, it does dismay me that my desired profession is not, so to speak, my calling. It implies (particularly considering I have ambitions in physics to match my ambition in philosophy) that while said profession is something that will be attained with sustained effort, which I often exhaust myself in providing, the actual calling -- once the object of similar, if comparatively undisciplined, effort -- cannot be pursued in such a way. In physics I can guarantee myself a measure of success, perhaps even a high one, simply by ensuring that every day I am better at physics than I was the day before. This program, supplied enough energy, can take me far, and has already. But similar questions, even more pressing ones, arise as in philosophy: Why should it be you who succeeds as a physicist? Why not those many other talented, intelligent, and able students? Have you fallen -- again! -- under the spell of some image of accomplishment, of greatness? Why do you want this? Philosophy is a passion, a duty, a failing and an everything; for it the question "Why not, how not?" overwhelms the question "Why?". Physics I merely love.

No, it does not dismay me.

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Perfection is for those who want eternity. Completion is for those who want an eternity to end.