I turn 30 soon. The age milestone is irrelevant. Sadly though, it marks a decade of becoming boring.
I was never angrier than at 18. I punched holes in the wall, fought with my parents, cheated on my girlfriend, and drank myself silly. And that was just Saturday night. I hated insincerity, flattery, and often loathed myself. I was never more interesting, more surrounded by friends, and haven't since put out prose of any decent quality. I wasn't really an asshole or bully, just a bored and angry teen looking to have some fun and assail the greatest perceived wrongs in my own small world.
Well, lots of weed and a liberal education will temper that. The modern act of college education develops multiple tolerances, to preachy environmentalists, omnipresent vagrants, and a host of slighted, hyphenated Americans. While trying to impart their quota's worth of education on me, University failed to impart a decent understanding on the nature of Rationalistic thought, and that really bit me in the ass.
Rationalism is at worst, a complicated contradiction: at best, a murky duality. The blueprint of our educational system was hatched roughly around 500 BC. Socrates (and a bunch of other child molesters) thought that in order to understand the world, we needed to unerstand ourselves, and we needed to do so with rational thought. The contradiction/duality that lies therein, is that while our true self is supposedly rational, we can never truly understand the world with rational thought alone. It takes moral development to extricate ourself from our irrational self. In other words, no fun.
In an era where the Church controlled education, such a goal was more attainable. But in the modern reality, the price i paid for putting up with aggressive panhandling was taking occasional joy in watching Hobo Joe beat the shit out of Vagrant Tim. I had opportunity in class to apply critical skills to practice. After that, I just wanted to get drunk and try to get laid. Moral development be damned.
So like many others, I shed my teen angst to seek an appropriate combination of education and fun. In hindsight, after my 4 years, I considered myself a pretty good Rationalist: able to bypass other's petty emotional shortcomings and use application of fact to understand the new world stretching out in front of me.
My rationalism, though hollow, took several years to show flaws. After moving up to the hinterlands for a spell, I used my incomplete philosophical understanding to explain away bigotry, racism, and stupidity in my community as only a matter of perception. I was functioning as most other over-educated liberals of my social standing - an intelligentsia that pitied faults enough to keep from scorning them. Instead of calling the 3-toothed bigot an asshole for who he was, I was caught up trying to understand the life experiences that led this sheltered rustic man to the viewpoints he espoused today.
The worst thing I ever did was subjugate my rage to my intellect.
The Greeks, though career pedophiles, understood the celebrated virtue of rage. I Iliad, one of the first written works of literature for our species, forgoes the immediate history of the Trojan War to focus instead on Achilles, and how his penchant for going berserker drove the war itself. The first line, and entire theme of the Iliad, are devoted to the rage of Achilles.
While your humble narrator was never dipped by the ankle into the River Styx (and only faintly resembles Brad Pitt), he feels a certain kinship with Homer's Achilles. Not to recap the entire epic, but the plot is driven by Achilles wrath; by both the taking of a favored wench by Agamemnon and the slaying of his BFF Patroclus. It makes for compelling reading. Though arbitrary and childish the rage of Achilles proves to be the catalyst that drives the Iliad, not to mention the subsequent generations of Western plagiarists and their assorted heroes.
Rationalism be damned, Achilles is an Empiricism and needs no further experience than that of an angst-ridden 18 year old to decide his course of virtue. Empiricism is the raging yang to Rationalism's subdued yin: it emphasizes the role of experience and senses in the formation of ideas. In many ways Achilles is childish and hotheaded, acting more like an enraged alcoholic than an enlightened Thesbian. But he gets results, if not sweet vengeance. We would idolize Achilles, save for his tendency to go a little overboard when dragging a dead Hector behind his chariot, and thus violating the rules of combat.
Rage will do that to a man. If Achilles was a pussy, nothing interesting ever would have happened to him (or been written about him). Even in death, he remains heroic. Though history diverges about the details of his death, Achilles is most often said to have been killed by a coward on a lucky shot. Others attribute Apollo to guiding the fated arrow, noting that Paris would never get credit for slaying such a hero.
Achilles, the great warrior-empiricist, is immune to arrows even in death.
In that spirit, I bring my fight to you. My great Rationalist experiment has reached its end. In 10 years, I have not been able to reconcile that great duality of man's nature. I long for the glory days of being a thorn in some one's fucking side, inspired and courageous. Who will be my metaphorical Briseis, my casus belli?
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Enclosed artwork: The Rage of Achilles, 1757, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Insulted by the Greek King Agamemnon (pictured on the left cowardly shielding himself behind his cloak) who stole Briseis, Achilles prized wench from the defeat of the Acheans, Achilles (Center) needs to to be restrained by the Goddess Athena (Right). Athena counsels patience, as greater glories await.
