This I...Whatever

By Crispin Sartwell

 

The applicability of principles to situations is always at best inexact, because situations bristle with specificities of which no principle can take account. Indeed, the broader the principle, the more it approaches the status of sheer yammer that no one can even hear, much less commit themselves to.

    Or rather, people do manage to commit themselves to principles, or slogans, or even the merest word, such as "excellence." The problem may not be in the state of the enthusiast's  sincerity, but in the absence of anything in the world that corresponds to or causes that enthusiasm: there is nothing out there that attaches itself as the reality to the abstraction that is "excellence." One floats into the term like a balloon into the sky, then pops. "God" is a word like that. "Truth." Even, God or whatever help us, "love."

   Principles always have the possibility of imposing or nurturing psychosis: a mere detachment from the real world, life among the abstractions, life that has left the world behind and now is lived nowhere.

    Nowhere is this more obvious than in "This I Believe": the phrase, especially under the interpretation of, say, Colin Powell, threatens to degenerate into cant.

    Principles do such a sorry job of finding reality that people have been tortured slowly to death as an expression of love or because of a commitment to human freedom.

     I have no idea what principles are worth living for or what the purpose of life is, and perhaps the only real purpose I want is to let go of purposes: immersing myself in a world in process in all its detail and renouncing the fantasy of transcending or explaining it.

        This I believe: Children are our future. Believe in yourself. Freedom isn't free. I believe in the promise of America. I believe in the amazingness of the sheer wonder of life.

    I believe that I have a dull headache here, right behind my eyes.