March 19, 2001

  •  I did manage to set some time aside to run at daybreak.  So splendidly crystal was the frozen air that tore at my lungs.  So yearning to break free my legs from gravity.  Running east and squinting into the rising sun, I felt like a cheetah chasing an antelope down.

     I did manage to set some time aside today to somewhat update my students’ website.  I’ve got to make this a higher priority! 


    I did manage to set some time aside today to delve back into literature.  I read an essay by D.H. Lawrence called The Death of Pan.  In it, Lawrence bemoans the intellectual simplifications imposed upon the world for reasons of economy and argues that the true hero is the common dweller who rebuffs the effort of the economized world to reduce him/her and the larger world away.  An excerpt:


          “This was the death of the great Pan.  The idea and the engine came between man and all things, like a death.  The old connexion, the old Allness, was severed, and can never be ideally restored.  Great Pan is dead.


          Yet what do we live for, except to live?  Man has lived to conquer the phenomenal universe.  To a great extent he has succeeded.  With all the mechanism of the human world, man is to a great extent master of all life, and of most phenomena.


          And what then?  Once you have conquered a thing, you have lost it.  its real relation to you collapses.


          A conquered world is no good to man.  He sits stupefied with boredom upon his conquest.


          We need the universe to live again, so that we can live with it.  A conquered universe, a dead Pan, leaves us nothing to live with.


          You have to abandon the conquest, before Pan will live again.  You have to live to live, not to conquer.  What’s the good of conquering even the North Pole, if after the conquest you’ve nothing left but an inert fact.  Better leave it a mystery.


          It was better to be a hunter in the woods of Pan, than it is to be a clerk in a city store.  The hunter hungered, laboured, suffered tortures of fatigue.  But at least he lived in a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe.”


    Can the “engine” bring man back into “a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe?”  Is this the horizon-promise of the internet, the soon-to-be world wireless web?  And what of Xanga and the relation it has helped forge between you and me?  Does the art of Alice, Deevaa, Spiritfoxy…and many others, the trench-digging matched by stratospheric soarings of James, the wonderments about existence as shared by Jewels, Byron, Prometheus, Agrochick78…and many, many others…confer a greater understanding and appreciation of the world around?  I do believe so, to some degree, at times.


     Meanwhile…


    With time stolen back,
    I’m a knave of the moment.
    No handcuffs grip now.

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