I’ve had a thought today, that may or may not be continued and expanded upon in a later entry, but which I thought I’d put down briefly while it was still in my mind. In fact, the point is that the thought won’t leave my mind, and I’m hoping that putting it down in writing will be, in some small mmater, cathartic.
Anyway, sometimes, I get really fed up with the condition of the house I’m currently living in. I’m here at IU with two other guys, you see, and my tendencies towards cleanliness and organization, while not comparable whatsoever to either of my parents (whose hospital-influenced cleanliness borders on OCD), are still in the top 5% of all Y-chromosome-carrying graduate students. That said, I do let a lot go, and my room is not always a model of sanctity and germ-free living. Still, the entropic mess that is the community kitchen and bathroom drives me nuts.
I spend a good hour or two every day to keep things from falling apart, washing dishes, scrubbing counters, tossing out trash, making sure rags are clean, etc., and probably once or week or so, I have to buckle down and do a really good job of it. Otherwise, produce and trash would be left out, there would be no pots/pans for cooking dinner, etc. The house would reek.
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Most of my friends know that John Keats is one of my favorite western poets, writing such beautiful works as “Endymion” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Most extraordinary to me is probably his resolve and good cheer in an atmosphere of such gloom: imagine a man whose entire family was plagued with tuberculosis, who would die at the age of 25 from that very same disease.
Then imagine the kind of poetry that you yourself would write in the face of such depressing circumstances. I don’t know about you, but I would be nearly paralyzed with my grief and anxiety. What meaning could there possibly be in life when your father, then your mother, then your own brother just die off, one by one?
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You would think that a Buddhist would kind of have his ego in check, and philosophically, I suppose I do. I know what the ego is from any number of perspectives ranging from the Freudian to the Nietzschian, having used that knowledge to argue my way to victory in many battles of rhetoric and wit.
But therein lies the problem, as my labeling and subsequent disregard for the ever-lurking beast has bitten me on my rhetorical butt. See, once you pretend that you know exactly what the ego is, when you pretend that you have it completely neutralized, that’s the moment when your own ego goes into cruise-control. That’s why those who seek to make themselves humble servants or martyrs to a cause tend to have the most hubris of all.
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