[Image: “Last Temptation: The Last Temptation of Eve,” by user Hartwig HKD (Hartwig Kopp=Delaney) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer provides virtually no information about the photo’s “meaning,” or its construction for that matter, and I’m not sure it’s worth trying to tease it out. But I will say it feels right for this week’s theme, such as it is… and that that feeling itself may be the point.]
From whiskey river:
Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.
(David Bohm [source])
…and:
We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives — lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction — are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not — or not necessarily — alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them… There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unlived life… So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.
(Adam Phillips [source])
…and (italicized paragraph):
Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we’re in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues…
So pay attention. As a summation of all that I’ve ever had to say as a writer I’d settle for that. And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I’d settle for that, too.
(Frederick Buechner [source])
