| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, February 09, 2009 - 4:03 pm: | |
I would say on balance yes. However I think that it is difficult being me because it takes a lot of restraint. I have to tread a fine line between smashing all the crockery and carefully rinsing my cup under the tap. Usually the second impulse wins. It is a learning curve. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - 11:19 am: | |
It's a strange question to ask. I think what I am wondering about is if it possible to enjoy *not* being oneself, or what that might mean, and if being oneself is necessarily a thing to be enjoyed anyway; a freedom, a happiness. Look at anyone 'being themselves', sometimes. Someone overweight say. In a way, they must have enjoyed being what they were in order to have become what they are, but on the other hand ... Well. But I think to myself, I sometimes have to work very hard to be who I am. A great many of the things that I now consider to be worthwhile have been achieved through sustained restraint and through persistent effort. For example, a relationship. Or a skill in reading. Anything learned or where I had to get outside myself. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - 11:29 am: | |
It's the same contradiction with all of us: we most like things which allow us to "get outside myself."
"Je est un autre."
John Wilkes Booth said that. Probably. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 11:24 am: | |
In a Ingmar Bergan movie I watched recently, the female character says to the male one, who is trying to win her, "I am tired of your egoism." Really there are women who could say exactly the same thing to me, with the same justice and tone of exasperation. The way I desire them is not out of a sense of responsibility, but in the absence of that. The desire exists because I am not responsible. Now, I don't think this is uncommon. It is extremely hard to desire something responsibly: to feel the intensity of a desire with the same degree of force as when one is, in fact, responsible. |
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