Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: January 28, 2020 08:47PM
I am drunk. I am somewhere south of where Captain Cook is purportedly buried. I am happy, content, thoughtful. I am privileged.
Ye soul deniers, how, how do you deny the great “I Am” that is you? I love you, but I do not understand you.
I am reading:
“Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent
self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly
individual history of experience, perception, and thought.
For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final
redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I
who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone,
the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful
to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged
a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives
whose behests we answer to so diligently. Our religious
traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious
words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I Am. Putting to one
side the question of their meaning as the name and character
by which the God of Moses would be known, these are words
any human being can say about herself, and does say, though
always with a modifier of some kind. I am hungry, I am
comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent
into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself
made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being,
may only startle in the dark of night, when the intuition
comes that there is no proportion between the great given of
existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which
it is inevitably forced. “I am Ozymandias, king of kings.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
—Marilynne Robinson—
—Absence of Mind—
I am,
Human