I just finished a book about the new civilisation.. called ' The barbarians'
( Al.Baricco)
The Google & Mc Donalds' fellows...'the surfers'.
It made me think once again about this new type of looking at life..more at the surface than in depth..more willing to speed up than to dig inside.. more keen to experiment all sorts of sensations than to concentrate on a single side..
I used to consider it, as most of people would say at least at first, that is a worse type than what we( part of us at least) still worship..that is the 'true deep sense of life, years of effort to self assesment and concern towards the others'. All that old fashioned stuff in the eyes of the 'barbarians'..
But ..is it better or worse? A question most of you would probably still answer for the latter.
I appreciate the autor's judgement..it's neither one of those.. it's only different.. life is evolving..or at least getting different..nothing would stop that.
People just enjoy more the sheer plesure of senses, and why should this be blameworthy?
Still..
I look back at the time I wasn't asking myself any kind of questions..just living day by day..as simple as that..I could say I was more content..but questions started to make room little by little in my life..I became more fearful towards my own reactions.. passed through surprise, terror, worry, cowardice..
slowly I am drawing nearer the light at the end of the road..
for now only a glimpse of my nature..but accompaning that,here come more acceptance, more understanding, and I would dare say..more wisdom. ( it's just getting older, you can say. I totally agree. Still I 'm not sure everyone has the same way of looking at life as they get older).
I have a strange feeling for a time..I sometimes look at children in the eyes..in parks or in the bus or wherever and feel..that if I was in a likewise circumstance, I could teach them something..it s not a well defined 'something'...
I also got a different understanding of the meaning of being rich in this life..
Because at the end, all that you own is just what you gave or shared with the others.
It's no paradox. It's about being HUMAN.
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3 comments:
I've been thinking a lot about this lately.....why on Earth, haven't I thought the things through when I was younger...in highschool for example.... I guess I would have known better how to deal with particular circumstances...
this process of understanding works rather slow for me.... I wonder why it took me so long to see certain things that now seem so obvious, you feel ashamed to call it a "discovery".
to come back to what u said about the shallowness... since we have a limited amount of time a day and are bombed with information from allover much much more than 30 years ago... we kind of have to choose between: covering more things but superficially or going in depth ignoring most of the other things that are "on the market"....and of course, the more in detail you get, more difficult it gets.
Manu, in order to understand quicker and (more important) better you must read well-thought and -written books. There's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel - i.e., thinking again what a smart guy - the author - already figured out for his readers.
A lot of information was also available 30 years ago: Usenet :). And also 100 years ago: the libraries. Both, impossible to read fully in a man's lifetime.
Dear ghrt, you are completely right about the amount of information available 30 years ago....and still the information available is growing exponentially..
With the number of websites rises also the possibility of finding interesting things to read...of course the crap content rises too... In total, you have more information to sort out..
what I am trying to say is that on top of libraries and traditional media, we have access nowadays to additional free information....and as you were saying, it is impossible to read everything in a lifetime... BUT....
we have to choose how to divide our reading time between going more in depth in the topics that interest us, or covering shallowly the rest
...at least this is the tradeoff that I am facing every day.
What I meant by the "rediscovery of the wheel" is that as you go through life and you change your perceptions about the environment or the people around you... you kind of see the world with different eyes and understand more about it...right?...and while you feel amazed by your personal discovery, there were other people who understood that some time before you and pinned down their ideas in brilliant books......this is for me the "rediscovery of the wheel"
And when I find one of these brilliant books, my discovery becomes relative..... it was at least new to me until that point...if not to the rest of the world.
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