metonymy4u

For Kierkgaard, irony stood out most splendidly in the modes of aesthetic and ethical self creation. In these areas we routinely see figures dedicating themselves unqusestioning and unquestioned, to the realization of public hope in private vision. The artist who struggles against every poverty of the flesh, painting or playing their instrument to the end, the jurist who battles the law’s delay and the insolence of the prideful, holding fast the ethics of a universal good will, these we know and have a place for in our hearts, our lives. But the pious? Those pious who pair word and deed, heart and hand, where do we keep them now? With all their strange, scary, sacred ideas coming and going all day and all night? Too often I think (mea culpa) they are seen as the fanatics, the deluded, the “over the top,” and those who might have a vision of the good life are therefore afraid of speaking out too much. What secular visionary have we had, since Dr. King? And where along the way did we lose the public idea of meaning, of effort, of commitment? Does it always have to be sacrificed to the consequences of cruelty and narrowness of hope?