Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Don't look back

"The pains people endure would be less if only ... they did not put so much imaginitive energy into recalling the memory of past misfortune, rather than bear an indifferent present with equanimity." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther' (p.25, Penguin classic).

This is Buddhism.

The medieval idea of hope - at least as portrayed in Giuseppe Mazzotta's Yale lectures on Dante - as a belief that the future can redeem the past, is based on the idea that we do look back.

Which tribe was it that pictured us moving through time walking backward, because we look at the past and cannot see the future?

Which poet uses this?

Leonard Cohen talks about being blessed with a bad memory of his life.

Ingmar Bergman - in that late documentary Bergman Island - talks of a guilty conscious being an affectation.

Misunderstandings and lethargy

"Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps lead to more complications in the affairs of the world than trickery and wickedness" - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (p.26 Penguin classic).

This pithy observation could well apply to the mess and confusion within large corporations today.