Some related things on the significance of having — and finding and cultivating — ideals.
Kay Ryan:
“Odd Blocks”
Every Swiss-village
calendar instructs
as to how stone
gathers the landscape
around it, how
glacier-scattered
thousand-ton
monuments to
randomness becomes
fixed points in
finding home.
Order is always
starting over.
And why not
also in the self,
the odd blocks,
all lost and left,
become first facts
toward which later
a little town
looks back?
I think that speaks as much to meaningfully finding your way through life’s randomness (appreciating the “odd blocks”) as it does to having “ideals,” but I think it’s related.
More to the point, Ryan said in a 2000 essay that we all know ideals are not fully attainable.
Yet one must hold such banners aloft, stitched in gold upon a field of gold. For there are powerful enemy banners …
Nan Shepherd:
How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? — the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquilise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle — as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.
That seems to me to be a perfect combination of Kay Ryan’s necessary “banners” and her beautiful, “odd blocks.”
The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.
Now, this one sounds to me like an idealized lack of ideals, or something to that effect, which is an idea, and perhaps a phrasing, that I find quite attractive. You could say that this presentation of Christian life and practice is idealized, and I think it certainly is. But for all the eye rolling that “idealists” suffer, another way to think of some idealized good is to see it as something that must and should be worked for.
The writer’s description of Christian community may strain credulity, but it also strains possibility.
Vladimir Solovyov:
So-called spiritual love is a phenomenon which is not only abnormal, but also completely purposeless, because the separation of the spiritual from the sensuous to which such love aspires, is accomplished without it, and in the best possible way by death. True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of immortal from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.
Love in its true form, ever both real and idealized, is love that embodies, transfigures, regenerates, resurrects — creates.
G. K. Chesterton:
I believe myself that this braver world of his will certainly return; for I believe that it is bound up with realities, like morning and the spring. But for those who beyond remedy regard it as an error, I put this appeal before any other observations on Dickens. First let us sympathize, if only for an instant, with the hopes of the Dickens period, with that cheerful trouble of change. If democracy has disappointed you, do not think of it as a burst bubble, but at least as a broken heart, an old love-affair. Do not sneer at the time when the creed of humanity was on its honeymoon; treat it with the dreadful reverence that is due to youth. For you, perhaps, a drearier philosophy has covered and eclipsed the earth. The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, «Abandon hope all ye who enter here» over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of today have written it over the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, forego for a little the pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green. Unlearn that sinister learning that you think so clear; deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. Surrender the very flower of your culture; give up the very jewel of your pride; abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.
You won’t find much more Chestertonian Chesterton than that!
ABANDON HOPELESSNESS, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!
That strikes me as a perfect banner to hold aloft, “stitched in gold upon a field of gold.”
Søren Kierkegaard:
Suppose there are two artists and one of them says, “I have traveled much and seen much in the world, but I have sought in vain to find a person worth painting. I have found no face that was the perfect image of beauty to such a degree that I could decide to sketch it, in every face I have seen one or another little defect, and therefore I seek in vain.” Would this be a sign that this artist is a great artist? The other artist, however, says, “Well, I do not actually profess to be an artist; I have not traveled abroad either but stay at home with the little circle of people who are closest to me, since I have not found one single face to be so insignificant or so faulted that I still could not discern a more beautiful side and discover something transfigured in it. That is why, without claiming to be an artist, I am happy in the art I practice and find it satisfying.” Would this not be a sign that he is indeed the artist, he who by bringing a certain something with him found right on the spot what the well-traveled artist did not find anywhere in the world — perhaps because he did not bring a certain something with him!
Whether you’re talking about an art or an ideal, or about love or faith: you bring a certain something with you and you discover something transfigured in what you see.
Richard Wilbur:
A Summer Morning
Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.She makes a quiet breakfast for herself,
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears,
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,A gardener works before the heat of the day.
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.His young employers having got in late,
He and the cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.