Harold Carr

music featuring harold

Story About Love by Marilyn Lerner (w/ Marilyn)
It's Up To You by h. carr (w/ Marilyn Lerner and Flavia Cervino-Wood)
more music ...

home :: books :: 2005-04-14-TragicSenseOfLife.html

Thu, 14 Apr 2005

The movement from a view of life as essentially simple and orderly to a view of life as complex and ironic is what every individual passes through in becoming mature. ... Amid simplicity and order rationalism is born, but rationalism proves inadequate in any period of upheaval. Then equilibrium must be created out of opposites. Such inner peace as [we] gain must represent a tension among contradictions... A feeling for [dramatic] paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exists side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth.

Robert Venturi quoting August Heckscher

We are surrounded by life but everything dies - thus the irony.

We ourselves are alive and seem to escape death like Odysseus under the ram, but our family, friends and we ourselves, die - thus the tragic sense of life.

The trick is to turn this tragic sense into a source of joy and wonder. Into the infinite now.