For quite a while now, I have been looking for genius. In anything. And I have failed to find it. What is it with this age? Why can we not create great stories, films, plays, etc.? I don’t mean best-sellers, I mean a reflection of our time, this barren age of human creativity. What am I saying? I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating. But what about the future generations? How would they know what we thought, how we felt, how we lived?
I was listening to The Current on CBC. There was an interview with a doctor who believed, or liked to believe, we could all live long lives without disease. Prevention is the key, he said. Or something close to that. Don’t stress your body because stress leads to inflammation and that potentially leads to cancer. Eat everyday at the same time, don’t make your body stress over “when will I be fed?”
The whole world is full of this, this stress over no stress. Imagine a world of absolute calm, what does it mean? Where would it lead us? To a state of absolute vegetation, I think. We have come a long way from apes not by trying not to worry but by marching forward, by taking risks, by losing every now and then. What leads us to creation is a state of uneasiness, unhappiness, a sense of something not being right, something beyond our limited box of individual existence. I remember Tennessee Williams saying that security is the worst enemy of mankind*. Man is meant to struggle… And he struggled and through his sense of uneasiness, he managed to create legends for us to contemplate, to wonder at, to aspire to.
There is nothing wrong with trying to live a healthy life, but there is a sense that if we eat well, exercise, and avoid smoking and … , we will have a great life. Well, take a look at the lives of people like Tennessee Williams and tell me what they missed? What is more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof? as he put it.
