FACE WITH SOBER SENSES

May 18, 2020 

I came across this post from March, 2013 that I had somehow neglected to upload. I think it has aged enough.

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
— Karl Marx

Back in Brewster, up again after falling asleep at 8:15 p.m.

Romantics live in possibility and expectation, I have decided. And while possibility and expectation can be okay, they really don't lead to the concrete and possibly the productive. I mean, we all flibbertigibbit from one lovely plan to a new idea and we might not even realize failure or a less than ideal outcome when we see it, because we are still in possibility land. There's always some creative spin or reuse or redemption.

I have lived my life this way, waiting for things to fall into place, (watching the dectectives?) missing some harder, corporeal, tangible, hell maybe even fungible results or rewards. See, when you are a romantic, there is always the future. Around any corner. Maybe next week.

But romantics age, too. And here we are, not just me, later in life with, well not nothing to show for it, but not security (and we all know that's a relative thing anyway) but accomplishments or satisfaction either. I'm not the only way with boxes full of projects and ideas, all the trimmings for a house and a life I don't and won't have. And yet still utterly attached to all the things, the ideas, the hopes.

One wouldn't want possibility to be an unpleasant, ugly, or perjorative word. But what have you got when nothing gels or materializes. Not even anything solid to melt into air. Certainly, the real conditions of life are understood these days in ways neither the Baby Boomers nor their parents, even though they faced hardships, really considered. Or did they?