A short thought.....

As I was reading through the blogs, something caught my eye in Kevin Luby's blog, (good post, by the way), I just noticed a small connection to the Highbrow/Lowbrow Class that I thought I would mention. Kevin lists, in his blog, these Practical Lessons for Lily from To The Lighthouse:

First Practical lesson: To find our inscape, our uniqueness, our god given
cosmic purpose, we must take a risk and begin looking.

Second Practical
Lesson: Finding personal inscape is difficult. Sometimes the struggles will fill
the soul with such emptiness and despair that quitting feels like the only
option. But quitting is not an option. As an old football coach once told me,
“if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Third Practical Lesson:
Little things are Very Very Big Things

Fourth Practical Lesson: Our
personal Inscape exists and though difficult, it is attainable.

all of which sounded to me like Santiago's Personal Legend (from The Alchemist).....(read more about The Alchemist at my other Highbrow/Lowbrow Blog), and Arjuna's dharma (Bhagavad-Gita)........I just really enjoy the link of the Personal Legend and dharma to inscape. It is as if fate is involved, or rather a supreme meaning or path to life that you can choose to follow or not. Just as for an epiphany perhaps. Eliot echoes in my mind, "we had the experience, but missed the meaning". Can have the epiphanic experience, but to notice it or discover the meaning is optional. Annie could have just seen the total eclipse and driven off to have breakfast and had the feelings the she expressed in Total Eclipse, but not developed the meaning. What is the meaning? Tough question. I don't know. But Santiago did not know the meaning of his own personal legend at the beginning, he needed the King in the gold breastplate, and the alchemist from the oasis, and more. And Arjuna needed Krishna. Ratty and Mole needed the River God Pan.

(Bhagavad-Gita..... a side note to my 'short thought', I like the way that Arjuna's experience is not simulated, because he has a physical reation to it. As I was reading Arjuna's hairs kept bristling, perhaps like the way mine do when my neck is lightly touched.....or maybe that is entirely something else. In the Miller's introduction she says, "The representation of Arjuna's involuntary physical responses, such as his trembling body and bristling hair, dramatizes the pity he feels before the specter of disorder and impending slaughter. In Hindu aesthetic theory such responses are considered highly significant because they arise from inner feeling and cannot be simulated." :
"My limbs sink,
my mouth is parched,
my body trembles,
the hair bristles on my flesh."
This also reminds me of the screams that came from people as the moment of totality was upon them from Annie Dillard's Total Eclipse piece.)

So now I've sort of turned myself about, because in some ways it seems epiphanies can happen at any moment, unsolicited and unmediated like Proust and the Cookie......the whole world in a cup of tea.....OR......a little help is needed, as in the case of Santiago, Arjuna, Ratty and Mole....I could go on. But I did title this 'A short thought.....' perhaps more appropriately, 'A rambling thought.....'