To Be

To be or not to be. How old were you before you even began to understand Hamlet's opening words to his most famous soliloquy? I recall clearly that it was so much gibberish to me before I began to absorb even the obverse meaning, the literal meaning. If you accept Christian dogma, including the dogma of Original Sin, then what right could we possibly have to exist: unless and until God forgives us, saves us? On another hand if your a naturalist, then surely we have a right to be born, to breathe, to eat ... to move around ... to breathe out, to defecate, to pollute ...

How's this for literature?
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.Recognize it? Does this help?Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.I first saw those lines printed in a church on the south shore of Lake Geneva. It thrilled me. It was a Christian church, pseudo gothic, but I tell you the prose is pure blasphemy: there's no original sin in it, and the God doesn't jibe with any Christian orthodoxy. This is a secular poem with a God you can make up as yo go along. The church's post offered a provenance: "found in a Baltimore church in 1692." In fact here's the whole quote:Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass.

Take kindly to the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.Makes you feel holy? It's a secular holiness, not at all Christian. And trust me: I know seventeen-century English: and that prose is post-Eighteenth Century! But then the story is well known by now. See for example this. Another church passing around more misinformation.

Before the Romans (and the Jews), cultures of law, no one, nothing, needed a right to exist. It's only in an over-crowded over-managed (kleptocratic) world, a world full of laws and lawyers, a world run by manipulated ambiguities, that anything needs a right to exist.

Christianity is kleptocracy that would shame us, then allow us relief: salvation: if we behave (not the way God said; the way the kleptocrats say!) Contemporary kleptocracy, kleptocracy descended from the eighteenth-century rationalists (ha ha, meaning atheists, of course, deists, like Jefferson, Adams, Washington) would shuck us of our designer guilt and recloth us as innocent thieves (who don't even know what they're stealing, that they're tresspassing).

Aside: Do you know this Woody Guthrie verse? Everybody knows his This land is your land, this land is my land ...
As I went walking
Along the woodlands
I saw a sign there,
Said No Trespassing.
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin'.
That side was made
for you and me!Never mind if my words are slightly different from some printed version: Woody wouldn't have. He changed his own lyrics as he sang: there's no one correct version. He's a folk hero, not an editor.

Note further: Woody wrote that and many another song in a project for FD Roosevelt. The politics are very complex. The sentiments are largely left: meaning government control, government interference, meaning socialism; on the other hand the anarchist sentiments are ineradicable. I love Guthrie for the anarchism, and the humanity, not at all for the alignment with the Democrats.