What Matters Most by James Hollis

Author:James Hollis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-26T03:00:00+00:00

Goethe’s personal motto was Dauer im Wechseln—“what abides amid change.” So, what provides continuity amid our sundry discontinuities? Certainly the Self abides our constant deaths. Our cells divide, die, generate at a slowing pace, and we are not the same bodies now as the moment before. Memory helps, but we cannot even answer the simple question “Of what are we unconscious?” Yet there are, from time to time, points of reference, benchmarks, lines drawn from which we get a provisional baseline, a fleeting summons to the next goal, a moment’s thought that this absurd, arbitrary game we call our lives might actually mean something. Sometimes a foolish passion opens a slit into the mystery. And, as Louis Armstrong said of jazz, those who have to have it explained to them will never know.

Things fall apart . . . the center cannot hold, as Yeats proclaimed in 1917. And since that slippage began, most things we cherish have gone still farther south, fast. Yet certain moments abide, certain foolish passions continue to nourish and animate. Perhaps, even at this moment, it still is the bottom of the ninth, runners on second and third, 2 and 0 on the batter, and the pitch is loosed. . . . All is open, it seems, still; the game is on, now; the game is on, and we are in it.

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