January 27th, 2009
So it’s been a busy couple of days. We hosted poker, and somehow that turned into a full day of puttering – grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking. The evening was fun and my dad took second place (Husband took first!). I of course just hovered about the periphery drinking rye and ginger ales and chatting up the folks who busted out as they did so. Dad stayed over and the next day we just hung out together which was very pleasant.
And then last night we went to UBC to see James Randi speak, which was a lot of fun. It was a keynote speech and therefore more conversational than I might otherwise have expected, and though there wasn’t really much in the way of new information for me, I was still quite pleased to see him in person. I could have seen him much closer and more personally if we had stayed in the bar later – after the speech there was a meeting of a local group called Skeptics in the Pub downtown, and though we left early and missed it, Randi showed up there! Drat my rotten timing! (You can see a wicked picture of Randi from the pub here on Puck’s blog.)
Anyway… all is not lost. I’m just finishing up a lovely little book by Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst and sociologist) called The Art of Loving1, from which I reprint this quotation:
The practice of any art has certain general requirements, quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry, medicine, or the art of love. First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if “I am in the mood” may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that of discipline in the pracrice of this particular art (say practicing every day a certain amount of hours) but it is that of discpline in one’s whole life. One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discpline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to “relax.” This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but presribed for him by the rhythm of the work, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.
- Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper, pp. 100 [↩]
i was just trying to remember this quote. lovely book, thanks.