Happy New Year
To all the readers of SHS, a wonderful, safe, healthy, and happy New Year. And remember, in the end we all destined to be yesterday's news--as the above photograph I took in Rome symbolizes. (You will, no doubt, notice that there isn't a photo. Blame Blogger: It won't upload. But hey, that's what imaginations are for.)
The end of a year is a kind of dying, and it reminds us that a time will come when we shall not be here to pop the champagne. Leon Kass believes--and I think he is entirely right in this--that our knowledge of death is, ironically, a crucial ingredient to our living better lives. He writes:
Could life be serious or meaningful without the limit of mortality? Is not the limit on our time the ground of our taking life seriously and living it passionately? To know and to feel that one goes around only once, and that the deadline is not out of sight, is for many people the necessary spur to the pursuit of something worthwhile. "Teach us to number our days," says the Psalmist, "that we may get a heart of wisdom"...So, while we are here, let's make the most of it and give our posterity something about which to be proud. We won't get a second chance at this life, so it makes sense to do it right. And if there is a life beyond, well what we do here undoubtedly matters there, too.[T]there is the peculiarly human beauty of character, virtue and moral excellence [that can come from our knowledge of mortality]. To be mortal means that it is possible to give one's life, not only in the moment, say on the field of battle, but also in the many other ways in which we are able in action to rise above attachment to survival. Through moral courage, endurance, greatness of soul, generosity, devotion to justice--in acts great and small--we rise above our mere creatureliness, spending the precious coinage of the time of our lives for the sake of the noble and the good and the holy. We free ourselves from fear, from bodily pleasures, or from attachments to wealth--all largely connected with survival--and in doing virtuous deeds overcome the weight of our neediness; yet for this nobility, vulnerability and mortality are the necessary conditions. The immortals cannot be noble.
And on that rather morbid but I think important note, I bid you a fond adieu until 2008. Y'all come back now.
Labels: Happy New Year
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:48 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
String together all the small things in our lives like pearls and fasten them with a silver catch. Wear them around the house and out amidst the people, where these small things can be seen, and recognized as being of great worth. In a cold wind they clack together around the neck and the sound is a comforting chime that draws us to our memories. In the heat of the day they shadow the heart and keep it cool in times of aggression. At the end of the day, we step out of our garments and slip into bed, these pearls we have to wear and to comfort us, these pearls we pass to the generations that follow. But it is only in the night, when we lay ready to sleep, that we really recognize the beauty of these pearls. For in daylight they shimmer white, but in the final moments of the darkness of the night, before we close our eyes, only then do they glow with their own inner light, and only then do we realize how beautiful they really are.
...I have *no* idea who wrote that, but I think it's pretty. And it kinda goes with Kass' sentiment about how mortality makes us enjoy life more. Anyway, happy 2008.
Oh! On a separate note, the world was supposed to have ended:
December 1999 - Alien Invasion
Year 2000 - Since if you divide 2000 by 3 you get 666.6666 repeating, we naturally should've blown up by then.
May 31, 2000 - The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in front of Taurus and the return of the Star of Bethlehem would herald the end of the world.
September 29, 2004 - Asteroid Toutatis made close approach to Earth and was suppposed to either crash into it or herald the end of the world.
Year 2007! - 'End of world; Implied in Hal Lindsay's revision. 1st said 1948+40=1988; Later Israel did not have land until 1967 War; 1967+40=2007; Rapture seven years earlier. Also now says generation from 60-80 yrs. Puts it also at 2040, 2047'
All this and more!
(I just got the above samples from http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm 'cause it was the first one that popped up on Google, but there are tons and tons of websites explaining why the world is going to end on X day, and then backtracking to explain why it didn't when, well, it didn't.)
Thanks for your information.
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Katie
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