![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Discuss...
Jul. 8th, 2016 05:30 pmMy parents were very... cautious people.
My stepfather was perhaps more cautious than my mother, as I do not believe he varied his daily routines or traveled further than 30 or 40 miles from the house over the last three decades of his life.
Maybe cautious is the wrong word, but I'll use it anyway.
Then again, the man had paid his dues, in terms of where and how he chose to live his life, for while a teenager he found himself adrift in the hell that was the Eastern Front, with pretty much everyone more than happy to kill him—he had the wound scars to prove it—after watching the rest of his family get hauled away by the authorities in Gorlovka, Ukraine (Horlivka, these days) for the high crime of being of German ancestry.
My mother was more adventurous, but cautious nonetheless. She preferred trains to airplanes, and despite what I suspect was an intellectual understanding that the most dangerous part of a flight was the automobile ride to the airport, I don't doubt that ancient, reptilian part of her brain—a part that you and I have embedded in our brains, too, I might add—simply refused to really, truly believe that anything other than magic kept aircraft from falling out of the sky. I might mention she was overprotective of me, but that's a subject for a separate multi-volume work, believe me.
So I find myself staring the following in the face, from Hunter S. Thompson's The Proud Highway: Sata of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967:
Cheers...
P.S. It appears to me useful to compare Thompson's idea with that expressed by Tennyson in Ulysses:
My stepfather was perhaps more cautious than my mother, as I do not believe he varied his daily routines or traveled further than 30 or 40 miles from the house over the last three decades of his life.
Maybe cautious is the wrong word, but I'll use it anyway.
Then again, the man had paid his dues, in terms of where and how he chose to live his life, for while a teenager he found himself adrift in the hell that was the Eastern Front, with pretty much everyone more than happy to kill him—he had the wound scars to prove it—after watching the rest of his family get hauled away by the authorities in Gorlovka, Ukraine (Horlivka, these days) for the high crime of being of German ancestry.
My mother was more adventurous, but cautious nonetheless. She preferred trains to airplanes, and despite what I suspect was an intellectual understanding that the most dangerous part of a flight was the automobile ride to the airport, I don't doubt that ancient, reptilian part of her brain—a part that you and I have embedded in our brains, too, I might add—simply refused to really, truly believe that anything other than magic kept aircraft from falling out of the sky. I might mention she was overprotective of me, but that's a subject for a separate multi-volume work, believe me.
So I find myself staring the following in the face, from Hunter S. Thompson's The Proud Highway: Sata of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967:
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”The subject line says "Discuss," but I'm just going to let this quote simmer quietly in that soup I call my mind, letting it rise and sink like some great bone. It seems to me there is something in what Thompson says, but as soon as I try to look at it, it disappears.
Cheers...
P.S. It appears to me useful to compare Thompson's idea with that expressed by Tennyson in Ulysses:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, [...]
