A Saturday morning thought...

[alexpgp]

The effect of books, like that of some kinds of vaccines, wears off over time. In most cases this is a benign phenomenon, with something of an upside and a downside.

The upside is the ability to read books read long ago as if they were new to you (for me, Agatha Christie's novels come to mind here); the downside involves losing whatever it was that affected your life, oh, so long ago.

For me, Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, falls into the second category. I am rereading the 1984 edition of the book, and found the following gem:

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

I will be thinking about this throughout the day, as I do some translation and a lot of cleaning! But for the moment, it's time for another cup of coffee!

Cheers...

Comments

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

My Mother-in-Law, born in 1913, used to send our boys books like Wind in the Willows, originally published in 1908. I felt a little sorry for her. Sure, it was a great book, but there had been so many others published since then.

The next logical step was I then contemplated how many children's books had undoubtedly been published since I was young. Suddenly I had a strong motivation to get reading all I had been missing!

However, when you read something decades after you first read it, some of your Life's Problems have shifted focus. You will probably be more interested in something different than the first time you read it. I once had the opportunity to stroll around my high school at age forty with a woman who had been my AFS "sister," a high school exchange student staying with me back then. We were (are) the same age and neither of us had been there since our H.S. days. We both oohed and aahed at all the exotic plants on the campus. Then she remarked that maybe when we had both been in high school, maybe we had been more interested in something other than plants!

And of course by the time you come back to it and reread, chances are that your incipient dementia has caused you to forget much of what you read the first time!

[daphnis.livejournal.com]

Learning to aim for the best possible outcome for many people goes against our greedy 'I--me--mine' instincts, as Frankl says, but it leads us into more fertile territories and shared happiness.

I probably didn't need to tell you that, but I'm easy to delete!

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

C. S. Lewis said much the same thing, though I've forgotten which book it was in.