Letters to the Editor
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Quality
First, this is one of the rare occasions that Cary's advice is to the point and has something to offer. Lately I often glance at the advice for 10 secs before skipping to the letters--where the real interesting opinions are!
To the LW now, I think you are under pressure to compromise. Thoughts like this cross the mind of many who are about to enter a commitment or have just done so. The right decision depends on the individual situation. Clearly being with a good woman does not preclude a heroic life (more likely it enables it). But it does preclude some kinds of excitement (maybe travel and adventure and enjoying other women, who will keep becoming more beautiful with time).
So it's important to ask: do you want to "do things", where "do" means "experience" or do you want to "do things", where "do" means "cause, create, make happen"? Your examples are of both kinds so it's hard to tell. If you just feel you haven't experienced life enough, refer to the old dilemma: "I'm inexperienced, should I commit?"
But it's more interesting to pretend this is a personal philosophy question, woman or no woman. Then the question is "should I pursue my dreams or settle"? This is where you need to start examining your dreams. If your dream is about the rewards that *you* will enjoy from the achievement, then you will most likely fail and you should settle instead.
Very few people are recognized for their deeds. Name all the people you know who have "built magnificent machines" or "started wonderful organizations" or "started overdue revolutions". Not many, right? In the history of mankind, all of us together will probably name maybe a few thousand different people who have done any of these (and all but the top thousand or so will be known to relatively few, and probably not rewarded enough for their achievement). Compare this to the many tens of billions of people who have ever lived!
Expecting to achieve the rewards of greatness is not a realistic personal goal in the 21st century (although, if it happens, fine, but it's already a bad sign that you don't think you are on the way).
But maybe your dream is about a cause, or an art, or an idea, or a way of thinking (or ... or ... or) that you consider important. There is a way to tell if your destiny is to pursue what fascinates you in a heroic effort: Ask yourself whether there would be value doing it even if it would *not* change the world. You should have a personal sense of quality, independent of the judgment of others. If you see quality in what you are doing, then you have found your destiny. If you think that it is enough that your magnificent machine would exist even if nobody used it, then your destiny is to build this machine and you should pursue it. And if you think of life that way, then Slaughterhouse 5 brings a message of hope: it doesn't matter if something survives or is recognized, it matters that it existed. If it existed once, it just *exists*, and time is only an illusion.
At least, that's the only consistent and viable personal philosophy I've ever come across.
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Homer wrote about this question too
It's an age old question, one that Homer brings up in the Illiad. Achilles has the opportunity to stay in Greece and live the good life and get marrieed and have lots of kids and die relatively unknown, or go to Troy and earn glory, but die young and alone. I'm guessing this might be the impetus for the origin of this letter.
It is a tragic decision to have to make, and I think, largely irrelevant in the modern era. My grandfather fought in World War II in North Africa. He earned his glory, then when it was done, he came home and went to school and became a successful small town lawyer. I think he got to experience maybe a little bit of both sides of the life of comfort versus the life of meaning.
Personally, I feel like I am also at that same cross roads. Where previously in life, I attempted to keep my options open so that I could lead the glorious life, recently I've begun to go ahead and commit to things. I recognized that by trying to leave my options open to accomplish anything, I was accomplishing nothing. I've slowly been starting to commit to new things (long term leases, car payments, steady girlfriend...) and I've noticed that life is worth living a little bit more, and I am accomplishing things. Maybe not great or glorious things, but really, Achilles cannot live today. He would be a B-list jock that ever makes anything of himself, awash in a sea of celebrity culture.
I like Cary's advice. Find something, commit to it, and your greatness and glory will arise from that. Hell, it worked for Truman.
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hi charlie, this is what i came up with
i too wanted to make something of my life, but i was more like walter mitty. i wanted it to come without all that much effort. i did get married when i was forty and had three kids and two step kids and after a bit (15 years) i discovered i was happy (now it's 20 years and the answer that i came up with is that there are two really ok forms of life, you can be a flower or a branch. (and let the next branch have the problem). it matters how old you are. maybe marriage is too early in your life - then again, you might not find anyone who suits you so well. but that's another problem. (you are both honest and don't take yourself that seriously - i don't think you'll go wrong no matter what you do) oh and Mika's Girlfriend, that's TOO SMALL (it's only one person in 10 TRILLION! (not even jesus would qualify))
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Define "heroic"
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.