The conclusion of The Twilight of American Culture:
I leave it up to you to decide if the glass is half-full or half-empty, or whether that even matters. For the “monk”of the twenty-first century will not be pursuing his or her activity for grand, heroic outcomes, but for the sense of worth and meaning that the activity itself contains. The work may lead somewhere; it may not. Our job is only to give it our best shot. Lew Welch, a San Francisco Beat poet of years gone by, put it this way:
What strange pleasure do they get who’d wipe whole worlds out, ANYTHING, to end our lives, our wild idleness? But we have charms against their rage—must go on saying, “Look, if nobody tried to live this way, all the work of the world would be in vain.”And now and then a son, a daughter, hears it. Now and then a son, a daughter gets away
As an old Quaker saying puts it, “Let your life speak.”In the end, that’s the only thing that really matters.
I leave it up to you to decide if the glass is half-full or half-empty, or whether that even matters. For the “monk”of the twenty-first century will not be pursuing his or her activity for grand, heroic outcomes, but for the sense of worth and meaning that the activity itself contains. The work may lead somewhere; it may not. Our job is only to give it our best shot. Lew Welch, a San Francisco Beat poet of years gone by, put it this way:
What strange pleasure do they get who’d wipe whole worlds out, ANYTHING, to end our lives, our wild idleness? But we have charms against their rage—must go on saying, “Look, if nobody tried to live this way, all the work of the world would be in vain.”And now and then a son, a daughter, hears it. Now and then a son, a daughter gets away
As an old Quaker saying puts it, “Let your life speak.”In the end, that’s the only thing that really matters.
