In Defense of Discomfort and Despair
Jan 21st, 2008 at 1:16 pm by Susie
My dear friend Somegirl has some inspiring stuff today:
I once had a Professor of Polish culture who was a key figure in the Polish resistance in WWII. He was captured and was dying of starvation in a prison camp at war’s end, a skeleton, ill, terrorized, barely alive. The American government brought him to the USA where he had important things to do concerning New Europe. He was put up in a hotel in New York. It was ironic, he told me, that only six weeks later, he was complaining to the laundry about how they did his shirts.
It’s bizarre, he would have said, that we spend most of our lives in search of the pleasure of comfort and ease, convinced that happiness lies there. The truth is, comfort saps your real strength. Ease is treacherous and steals your ingenuity. The devilish pair robs your intuition and dulls your vision. I have in mind also metaphysical comfort and ease, not only natural human desires for creature comforts which in practice, as we all know, are never enough.
Go read it all.
hey you make it sound like i wrote those words when they are the words of the guy i linked to, but thanks for posting!!!
xox
Got to go through it to get to it.
Graham Central Station circa 1976