Saturday, May 26, 2012

Idolatry in everyday life

It seems that my blog is turning to a Tumblr reblog site. As for my life, I'm kind of late to the party in reading The Lord of the Rings but I finished it yesterday and its my current obsession, and I'm about to write a long post on that. Another school year is starting, two years left and this dreaded college will be over. I hope that this semester will be better.

Here's another quote:
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

-David Foster Wallace, This is Water

2 comments:

  1. I'd read the Lord of the Rings also very late, 3rd year in college. What an experience! I'd never read any fantasy books after, I mean I can't read any other fantasy books after that. Simply the best in the genre, or whatever that is. Other works pale in comparison. Until I saw the Game of Thrones series on HBO. It cures me. Now I'm almost done with the Clash of Kings. Have you read it?

    Also, I've read some short pieces by David Foster Wallace. But I haven't have any of his books.

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    1. Well, I like the Chronicles of Narnia as well as LOTR. I just watched the LOTR movies lately. I've heard a lot of good stuff about A Song of Ice and Fire and the TV series, but I currently don't have the time or money to buy (college coursework... the only books I ever read a lot nowadays are textbooks)... or read/watch. I'll surely read it sooner or later.

      I just read some pieces about and by David Foster Wallace on the net. I'd really like to have his Infinite Jest, but that can wait, too.

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