Monday, November 22, 2010
"But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!"
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
I wonder whether such a friend could possibly exist anymore in such a competitive world. I suppose I'm blessed enough to have friends who share my joy or share my pain, but I do so long for a friend who can share both. This world is too complex and made even more complex by globalisation (blame The Lexus and the Olive Tree for this thought).
"We are not forced to re-create our relationships with those closest to us on a regular basis, And yet that's precisely what Schumpeter, and Grove after him, suggest is necessary to prosper [today]." (The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman)
With the ever-changing perception of the meaning of human relationships, it wouldn't be surprising that some people might consider to have plenty of friends, while some may consider me to have none.
The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a really good read. I never really expected to be so engaged by it considering that I never got past the 1st chapter of The World is Flat. Well here's another quote from the book!
"Márquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. "This is a table," "This is a window," "This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning." And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads "The name of our village is Macondo," and the larger one reads "God exists." The message I get from that story is that we can, and probably will, forget most of what we have learned in life - the math, the history, the chemical formulas, the address and phone numbers of the first house we lived in when we got married - and all that forgetting will do us no harm. But if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost."
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
I'd like to thank my previous dentist Dr. Anna Tang for being such a wonderful dentist. I'm really sorry for turning up late most of the time and not appreciating how nice you were...until I met my new dentist today. Sigh. At least I'll probably have my braces off before I know it.
Wesley at
7:16 PM