i have this feeling - and this gets more and more unassailable as ever - that i really don't belong to my times.
increasingly, i find that i just don't seem to get them. the ways of my times, the circumstances and ideas of my present. especially with how people, our esteemed ones, mostly, take truth and its pursuit thereof as something easily attainable. truth being tactile and thus easily groped. truth as an utterable commodity, just one of the many our snake oil salesman of a society sells.
someone i sort of respect told me rather nonchalantly yesterday that maybe why i seem to get "no happiness" (her words) at all is that maybe, i have consistently failed to uncover the truth of my life.
the truth of my what?
is she right? such daunting question. not to mention, does she have any right at all to tell me that.
but the more i rue about her callous observation, the more it seems to me that this rather intrusive acquaintance of mine is merely spouting the feel of the age, the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist.
the newly elected pope rails consistently about the evils of the so called moral relativism. and the president of the most powerful nation in the world (and the most supercilious, too) has this procrustean worldview, lazily dividing the world into the good and the bad, the truthful and the not.
and then, there's oprah. she who exhorts her minions to discover the truths of their own lives. "it's your duty to know," she scarily tells them.
i grant you this much. there is such a thing as truth. but to coerce me to think, the way most everyone seems to think nowadays, that things can really be figured out that facilely, that methodically, that seems to be one big falsehood to me.
"falsehood is easy, truth so difficult," so said the victorian english novelist george eliot, who, i suppose, hardly anybody reads nowadays.
ms. winfrey, not a writer but a gazillion times more credible among millions today than ms. eliot, writes that the truth is that which feels right and good.
but then again, i must be doing alright. i feel righteous and i feel mighty good saying - actually, planning yet on what to say back to my rather judgmental acquaintance - i am happy with my so called unhappiness. thank you very much for asking. at least, i feel right and good about it.