@punishmenthurts @autistics

REPLY: "it’s not really up to you to “forgive,” a negative selective pressure." #ContextAssertion

#Perfection #Forgive #Forgiveness #WhyForgive ?

BILL MOYERS: So we tell stories to try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize our lives with reality? #WithReality

CAMPBELL: I think so, yes. Novels — great novels — can be wonderfully instructive. In my twenties and thirties and even on into my forties, James Joyce and Thomas Mann were my teachers. I read everything they wrote. Both were writing in terms of what might be called the mythological traditions. Take, for example, the story of Tonio, in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger. Tonio’s father was a substantial businessman, a major citizen in his hometown. Little Tonio, however, had an artistic temperament, so he moved to Munich and joined a group of literary people who felt themselves above the mere money earners and family men.

So here is Tonio between two poles: his father, who was a good father, responsible and all of that, but who never did the thing he wanted to in all his life—and, on the other hand, the one who leaves his hometown and becomes a critic of that kind of life. But Tonio found that he really loved these hometown people. And although he thought himself a little superior in an intellectual way to them and could describe them with cutting words, his heart was nevertheless with them.

But when he left to live with the bohemians, he found that they were so disdainful of life that he couldn’t stay with them, either. So he left them, and wrote a letter back to someone in the group, saying, “I admire those cold, proud beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise ‘mankind’; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor. Indeed, to me it even seems that this must be that love of which it is written that one may ‘speak with the tongues of men and of angels,’ and yet, lacking love, be ‘as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ ”

And then he says, “The writer must be true to truth.” And that’s a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting—the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called “erotic irony,” the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.

MOYERS: I cherish that image: my hometown love, the feeling you get for that place, no matter how long you’ve been away or even if you never return. That was where you first discovered people. But why do you say you love people for their imperfections?

CAMPBELL: Aren’t children lovable because they’re falling down all the time and have little bodies with the heads too big? Didn’t Walt Disney know all about this when he did the seven dwarfs? And these funny little dogs that people have—they’re lovable because they’re so imperfect.

MOYERS: Perfection would be a bore, wouldn’t it?

#BillMoyers /\ #Forgiving