Sep 08
Outlook on Life/ Nassau/ TS Eliot
And the wind shall say
“Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
~T.S. Eliot
TS Eliot must have been having a bad day when he made this pronouncement. And why did he decide to pick on golfers? I don’t understand.
Wait a minute! Maybe he WAS a golfer. And he had just shot a 78 on the back nine when someone overheard him say this. And of course they wrote it down.
I do understand his concern about asphalt however. Especially when it gets hot. But why does it seem like so many artists have such a gloom and doom outlook on life?
Here are a few more quotes.
Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. ~Author Unknown
A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. ~Martin H. Fischer
What?! No wonder the making of antidepressants is such a lucrative industry. It’s so easy to say life as we know it can’t go on. But I have a serious question about the six inches of topsoil. It seems to me that there ARE some civilizations out there in the desert. They have managed somehow to keep things going.
Or maybe this person was saying that if ALL the topsoil was lost we would have a problem. What would we do then? Well we wouldn’t be playing as much golf. And that would solve one of TS Eliot’s problems.
My feeling is that people who spend too much time being rational miss some of the joys of life. They overlook the wonderful things that exist all around us. And I’m not saying they should spend more time being irrational. Maybe they should just get in touch with some positive feelings. They do exist inside us. And they are very powerful.
But they can be blocked out. Repressed. Erased. And that’s a shame. Intellectuals get themselves tied into so many knots. They derive pleasure from being smart. And then they go overboard with it. Here is a photo I took when we spent a short time at the Atlantis complex in Nassau. I thought it was a lovely area. And it was completely deserted. Everyone was upstairs packed together in the gambling area. If I was younger and had a date I think I would bring her here.
