Maggie's Farm

BD, frankly and with no intended disrespect, through all the lifestyle blogging and various absolutes about how privilege, travel, life, and recipes must work, I've noticed a certain superior smugness - not to mention the moral ambiguity among those odd Sunday "lexionaries" and the naked girls in the previous post or the sexual references in the next.

But in this remark I fear you've rather arrogantly taken on a man you personally know nothing about and should take no privileges asserting on behalf of in order to again put your thumbs under your arms.

Have the decency to grant Dalrymple the right to his own outlook and life. I suspect that your ostensible Christian sensibilities, such as they may be, would at least allow for that, none the less for the level of mind the man obviously has.

Perhaps like yourself AVI, I grew up with those authors. In fact, I think I see in Dalrymple an existentialism not unfamiliar to those pages and more like them, assuming I have the right to speculate on the man's intent from one article.

(In that piece I thought TD quite wise, honest, and forthcoming. Forthcoming and touching. Depression is but a word, as Dr. Bliss may remind us shortly.)

If said Christian spirituality holds, TD's thoughts may well be more authentic to them than Epicureanism with a dash of window dressing. Who can tell?

I can't easily fathom where money and diversion are a preventative for responsible, aware inevitability, is all. TD speaks candidly about the consequences of age using a language not unlike a Christian's: Honest and without flinching. Reminds me of WF Buckley's admission to C. Rose that he was tired of life, or Kirkegaard's plea. Stuff like that comes from fullness, whereas my liberal friends speak of "skidding in" to death having exhausted every pleasure.

I happen to be one of those who think the Epicurean slogan Carpe Diem smacks of denial, which probably puts me on the wrong side of culture. Denied accountability also pretends to have no regrets.

Heroism lies in embracing all of life, not avoiding the hard realizations and their pain. Growth and contrast are superior to life with a remote and a sixpack.

Peck calls depression a gift. Jesus accepts the broken and down-trodden. Sackcloth and ashes have a deeply real primal spirit. In all this, accepting it is not looking for it, of course. But accepting it is plenty enough.