I was bored with reading, no longer able to focus on the text in front of me but still wanting to feign productivity, I turned to the internet. I decided to enlighten myself with a Ted Talk or two. Pursuing the video tags I first looked for art, nothing. Then down to Literature, maybe one or two to come back to. Then down to Poetry, where on the last page of the 31videos one existed with the title "How Many Lives can you Live?" This could be relevant to the Lucritian thoughts that were consuming me after reading The Swerve....
This is where the weird part comes in....the young woman on my computer scene looked eerily familiar. Her name Sarah Kay, no longer a generic name but one that seemed even more familiar than the girl's face....
As she started speaking I realized I knew her. Not only did I know her but I spent five or so summers with her in our childhood. Her cousin, was my best friend. The three of us, my best friend, Sarah and I would become inseparable whenever she came to visit, leaving our brothers to do what they wanted. And I remember hearing her voice again today that she was a great storyteller back then. She was three years older than my friend and I, she was our leader, our voice of wisdom.
Her video has astounded me, not because of the profound thought or her poetry, but because here is this young woman, no longer the girl I went to the zoo and beach and museums and wherever else our mothers felt we needed exposure to, here is an articulate grown up version of a friend, long forgotten in the time when our lives got busy and she no longer came to California to spend the summer in her Grandmother's house, at the beach with her cousins and friend.
I encourage you to watch her video, it is about 12 minutes long and the way she talks about her perspective on life and the poem she shares at the end are beautiful.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live.html
At the end of her poem she says that she had learned "the art of letting go". For me this ties back into Lucretius, and how finding pleasure is the goal in life and that death is nothing because we won't know it. By letting go of things and not trying to hold onto everything in our lives at all times, I feel that there can be a sense of freedom and enlightening. For Sarah, realizing that she could not be a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut, and that she could only be herself she has been able to deal with the anxiety of life. Also by letting go, there is not the anxiety of life, you can just live.
Wasn't sure how to get this to you. Here is the link and a couple of parts of the writing.
ReplyDeleteW. Rhys Roberts translation Longinus On the Sublime
XV
IMAGES, moreover, contribute greatly, my young friend, to dignity, elevation, and power as a pleader. In this sense some call them mental representations. In a general way the name of image or imagination is applied to every idea of the mind, in whatever form it presents itself, which gives birth to speech. But at the present day the word is predominantly used in cases where, carried away by enthusiasm and passion, you think you see what you describe, and you place it before the eyes of your hearers. 2. Further, you will be aware of the fact that an image has one purpose with the orators and another with the poets, and that the design of the poetical image is enthralment, of the rhetorical--vivid description. Both, however, seek to stir the passions and the emotions.
XVII
3. Something like this happens also in the art of painting. For although light and shade, as depicted in colours, lie side by side upon the same surface, light nevertheless meets the vision first, and not only stands out, but also seems far nearer. So also with the manifestations of passion and the sublime in literature. They lie nearer to our minds through a sort of natural kinship and through their own radiance, and always strike our attention before the figures, whose art they throw into the shade and as it were keep in concealment.
http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/longinus/desub002.htm