Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher who passed away about 20 years ago. This is a slim volume of speeches and essays he wrote, primarily in the 1950s.
After reading it, I now have my suspicions about why I bought it, but they are many and varied. Which means I'm glad I read it. The essays explored several ideas I've been contemplating, including contemplation itself. Also among them: Working to survive in relation to pursuits that exist for their own sake, the rhetoric of silence, creativity, connectedness, the need for us to truly see what exists--from a perspective rooted in love--if we want the journey of humanity to progress, to transcend. And, ironically, memory.
The challenge in writing a short post about a collection of essays that address a wide range of things is figuring out what to home in on. I took pages and pages of notes, far more than I want to put here.
So I've decided I'll simply share this recent experience, which came to my mind more than once as I read:
When I woke up the morning after we returned from last week's lovely soul- and family-nurturing trip, Roger kissed me. I had been thinking about papers I needed to grade for one job and hours I needed to put in at my other job, especially to make up for the time I'd missed. I started to whine about having to return to "real life."
He kissed me again.
"This is real life," he said. "This is real life."
1 comment:
Roger knows.
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