Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 992 Editor's Choice: 129
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Define "heroic"
[Read the article: I dream of living a heroic life but I fear I'm just mediocre]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It would seem LW has fallen prey to a romanticized and glamorized notion of the heroic, then complicated that with the delusion that because horrible things happen we have no free will. This strikes me as utterly upside-down. I got a very different message from "Slaugherhouse Five", but that alone didn't form my notion of what was possible for me in this world, in this lifetime.
Having suffered from a variety of physical ills routinely throughout my life (so far, anyway) I first discarded my fighter pilot fantasies, then rebuilt my life upon the premise that my free will had been revoked. "Slaughterhouse Five", among other works and influences, helped me to realize there is something larger than me, something of which I could become an active part, and that every single thing I did with my life in some way affected that part of the world I touched. In time I understood that to even be alive in the world is heroic and that we all, whether we know it or not, commit acts of dramatic heroism and equally dramatic acts of cowardice. Those cowardly acts, more often than not, are simply the ones in which we fail to act at all. The heroic, on the other hand, can be incalculable, and so long as we are not actively seeking self-aggrandizement in our heroism we will, inevitably, leave this place better than when we got here.
One's first and most heroic act is surrendering the self to the living of one's life. The rest becomes inevitable. Saving a dog or a human or the ground on which some men would scribe the right-of-way for some obscenely wide ribbon of concrete is heroism even if it is totally accidental or the result of our having given up our "free" will to a larger will.
Until we get past Che Guevara and John Wayne, rock-stardom and James Bond fantasies and begin to accept the need for those who will simply show up for the daily apocalypse there is no heroic life to be lived, nor even mediocrity, but only a chrysalis wrapped in the phlegm bag of self.
To get out of bed in the morning, to go outside, to meet the world and be prepared to walk into fire to get one's destination - this is the end of mediocrity and the beginning of heroism.
Scary post script: Once out there, one may not even feel there is time to fuck the beautiful women who most assuredly will turn out to divert the accidental hero. And knowing there is something more important to be done than simply gratify the most juvenile urges, that is to board the Night Train to Valhalla.
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The Rest of the World Really is Crazy
[Read the article: I'm mentally ill but I'm no mass killer]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For the LW here: Read, please, and then re-read what Cary has written. Written to you. I had just finished a brief screed on some forum, in response to someone who was thinking "mental illness" needed to be taken more seriously (now, all of a sudden), and while I was agreeing I was becoming concerned about the fact that there is a vast ocean of difference between the truly "mentally ill", the crazy, the quite possibly evil, and those with some slight chemical or electrical imbalance, who struggle with themselves every day and pose no real threat to anyone, who are often told so many times they have a "mental illness" that they start to refer to themselves that way. Don't do that. Read Cary's response again and begin to respect yourself as a living human being.
And as for Cary's response: I hear echoes of Jack Kerouac in here, and more. This is beautiful as well as true. This is a piece of work worth keeping. Bless the LW for posing the question and provoking this eminently worthwhile response. This is Cary on air. Responsible and yet seized, at the same time, by his true spirit, utterly sane. Thank you, CT, for letting this one fly. It's a keeper.