-This picture i found, is actually an illustration from probably my favorite book in high school The Monkey Wrench Gang. (For those of you who may have read it -i think thats Doc Sarvis- and damn straight for reading such a good book).
an interesting and amazing thing happened to me today: my TV stopped working. At first i felt robbed, distraught...bored. I tried tin foil, moving the bunny ears around but nothing would restore picture to the one of the four channels i receive. Having no other thing to do, and run to the end of my procrastination rope, i picked up Don Quixote and at first sort of got my feet wet, and ended up just diving in, completely submerged. I now -though i really knew all along- understood what Carly meant when she said that Don Quixote is better than anything on television. Damn was she right, i realize i waste so much time watching horribly dumb shit on TV. And i don't even watch that much TV! but i realized even a half hour, is a half hour not only wasted but half hour of toxin pumped numbly into my face. I do admit that from time to time PBS, throws some pretty good material at it. but its no saving stone.
a side note thats unfortunately depressing: It dawned on me that old Matty Arnold was correct yet possible didn't see the extent of his implications when he said,"More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. " how beautiful a world this would be if that were the case, however i don't think he could have foreseen the invention of television for if you look into almost any household, you would see that this statement is true if the TV were the substitute. If money isn't our religion of the masses than TV certainly is.
-back to what i was saying: I've really just found myself in the throws of this book, and when i needed a break i found my hands drifting towards all the unfinished Hemingway i had laying around the house.
One thing though, despite all this jubilation i felt while reading, i realized that i was missing out on something. today while i read and did other schoolwork, all of my friends hiked and skied Bridger. I realize what i was doing was important, but in a sense it was almost as false an experience as watch television. This is the same mentality that Don Quixote shares, although hes obviously well read, he is a man of action. or as he put it on page 475
"no longer does anyone ride out of this forest and into those mountains, and from there tread upon a bare and desolate beach...
...now, however, sloth triumphs over diligence, idleness over work, vice over virtue, arrogance over valor, and theory over the practice of arms which lived an shone only in the Golden Age."
This got me to thinking, if we are to believe as we've learned in class that the ages have steadily declined from Golden to Chaos despite the rise of "technology" then wouldn't it be most noble to resist all technology and resort back to our primal origins? is this blog somehow unconsciously touching upon daemons? if this is all true, are poets all liars as Plato says? and alas...will writing this defense be harder if I'm thinking like this?
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