(journal extract from February 6, 2012)
listening making lunch to CRI (China Radio International)
about life in China, and listening to the 30-something Canadian “Beijing Hour”
program host (Paul James), and reflecting on his mentality and ideas – I note
the mundanity in which he and so many live, move and have their being.
Berdyayev had an essay on this: "The Bourgeois Mind". Hesse also
described it in Steppenwolf. it is the dominant mentality – the mental,
cultural, social milieu of the “Westernized” world – though that is too vague
and inaccurate and malleable an idea to be fully adequate to my meaning. (and I
too was on a mystical journey in my quixotic mind of my 20s to 40s.)
it is the tendency of the average mind to unreflectively,
untroubledly, live inside of this world, life experience that feels like inner
dissolution to me. I can’t say I want the experience surrogated by “extreme
sports”, eg going into a war zone, or chumming-up to some of the Caucasian
rose-sellers I see outside the shopping mall in order to learn about their
life, but I will have, and do have, a reflective life which I am trying to keep
worth living, or worth having lived.
the majorities everywhere I have been seem quite content to
exist in their mundane, “bourgeois” life, and mind. As Hesse wrote about, or
by, “Harry Haller” – they do not want any heroic deeds on my part.
and since any kind of “higher” or transcendent “Meaning” is
apparently not really needed, or sought, by most people I meet, be they in eg
Russia, America, Egypt, Britain, Germany, it is not easy at my post-Romantic/idealist
age and experience of the world, to carry alone a sense that for example even
this is not “just another day”, and now more special than later. “here be no
monsters”; terra cognito.
but reading in , of such
figures as Thomas Müntzer, or the maelstrom of whirling world-views in the
English Civil War…probably shopping as a raison d’être is an earthly blessing.
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