Moon Time

Louis CK has a great joke about how cellphones make it impossible for us, and kids especially, to cultivate an ability to just be alone. Just be a person doing nothing. 

And I think education and English and arts ideally should be the opposite of a phone. It should help you reach the difficult rewards of being alone and doing nothing. We are really alone.

And I'm not saying that English is about becoming an anti-social person or that it is better than phones and technology and immediate gratification because you can't win that battle and I've probably already lost it myself.

What Louis CK says is that the reward of really experiencing tremendous lonesome sadness is true happiness and joy. I think that's true.

It's a really hard sell though. It's really scary to admit to yourself how alone you can be and it's becoming easier and easier to head off that feeling. But I think it's easy to go the other direction too. To say that everything is hopeless and irreparably awful and stop digging.

 Here's an attempt at a terrible analogy. Just this last December, I rediscovered an all-time favorite game of mine, trying to balance a broom on its end in the palm of your hand. If you've never done it before, it's all the thrill of dancing with all the neck-cramping fun of playing a video game demo in Wal-Mart. Anyway, the fun of it is the constant adjustments you have to make to keep the thing standing up right. You'll never find a spot where you don't have to move to keep the broom balanced. There's no definitive 'answer'. 

from https://normandyloveshumphrey.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/lunch-lunch-lunch-no-tv/

Now, it would be easy to constantly bring up your other hand and steady the broom and it would be even easier to just let the broom fall on the floor and leave it there and proclaim the futility of the exercise all together. The hard thing, the only thing that makes the endeavor worthwhile (to me), is to keep moving and adjusting and focusing and thinking about keeping the broom balanced with one hand or one finger or whatever.

So, what is balancing the broom in that analogy? I think it's true happiness. Or an authentic existence, which isn't always necessarily happy. And, unlike the pointless broom game which doesn't make much, I think art can be a product of that balancing. It can be a reminder or an urging of a difficult process that doesn't accept an easy answer. That

something good comes from the bad, a song is never just sad, there's hope, there's a silver lining.

All English offers to me is a process. A way of constantly creating and recreating a world you truly want to live in. And once you start that process the only thing you can do is keep going and going and going and going.

If you're already completely happy 100% and never lonely for a second, great. You have no need for English or learning. If you're so assured of the futility of existence and the meaninglessness of life then that's also great, you have no need for English or learning. But if you live in a world that has serious problems and you are lonely and unfulfilled for some reason, like me, but you believe that something can be done about it, something that involves your energy and effort and creativity, even if it only brings about a resolution for brief moments, then English and learning can probably help you with that.