How to Know Everything About Everything: Laura Riding’s Letters to an 8-Year-Old
brainpickings.org
brainpickings.org
If the highest intellectual, moral and emotional goal you can achieve is to know yourself, hour can anything be too selfish?
Yet, I hear far more often about what these people think of their lives, and far less about the actual benefit to others.
Maybe my moral compass is tuned differently, but the whole focus on "self" seems to be the most shallow when it comes to a happy life, but it sure is convenient ;P
This is too simple, but knowing I want a piece of cake does not mean I should or will eat one.
She is railing against the types of people that are so goal driven to a point where it becomes an obsession. She seems to think that over doing(which is what that is) stems from a poor understanding of who you are, and/or surpassing your own needs. For instance opening a local store. It's successful, makes enough money, but instead of being happy(your needs are met) you open a chain, take over the state, then the country and so on. Or the empty nester that now has no children to focus on has nothing to do, no skills to do anything, and no idea what they actually like to do. Since their entire world was built around someone else.
Also, never let the worst of a group define that group. If they are the worst they probably aren't following the actual ideology.(clearly this thinking fails with Nazi's or other extremists)
I guess my only criticism remaining is that I think one doesn't and shouldn't preclude the other, so when I see posts like this in isolation, in the current culture, it runs so aligned to the "please yourself" pop culture that it's hard not to see it as part of that. But I agree, knowing who you are is incredibly important. I personally believe that you can't truly know yourself unless you also invest in others so you know them well enough to contrast who you are and are not.
I really don't think there is anything in the writing that promotes/suggests the "please yourself pop culture" you mentioned; in fact, I don't think there is anything in the writing about pleasing oneself at all.
The closest thing that I can imagine is consider that you are on a hike alone and all of a sudden you feel the urge to play a tune. You take out your ocarina and just naturally play a tune. When you are done you simply continue hiking. You didn't play the tune to please yourself and you didn't play the tune to please an audience—you simply played because it felt like the most natural thing to do that moment, and it's good because of that.
> I personally believe that you can't truly know yourself unless you also invest in others so you know them well enough to contrast who you are and are not.
I tend to disagree with this. I personally think that you can't understand yourself through contrast with who others are (not least because you can never understand others better than they understand themselves)—that way you are simply creating an image yourself based on the opinions you have on other people, not because you are just being you because you understand yourself.
> I tend to disagree with this. I personally think that you can't understand yourself through contrast with who others are
I don't mean you should only or even primarily base your self-awareness in relation to the contrast, but that any view of yourself that doesn't at least have an understanding of your needs vs another person's will always be an incomplete one.
I have seen other sources say that kids need downtime. To just use their imagination. Constantly having your eyes glued to TV or your phone does not make a healthy person.
She also mentions that people make the mistake of 'over-doing'. Which I also agree with.
While I feel like she could have made her case clearer and cleaner(although she was writing to a child so maybe this is perfect), I agree with her.
IIRC she was Robert Graves' partner for many years, and later in life was something like a spiritual teacher seeking truth in language, of all places. Martin Seymour-Smith, who single-handedly wrote a great big encyclopedia of 20th century literature, regarded her as the best 20th century poet in English.
From the brief biography included: "After 1939, when she returned to the United States, she renounced poetry and wrote no more poems: she came to see poetry as obstructing the dedicated use of words for truth that it invited."