The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Essays in Love, and certain essential paradoxes

I was thinking in the shower, a hot and wonderful place to think in, where the only regard you have to your well-being is whether to turn slightly this way or that to receive the flow of hot water on each bit of skin in turn.  I'm still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being  in small chunks, but have just finished reading Alain De Botton's Essays in Love, which I started out liking, began to turn my nose up at half way through, but persisted back into an admiring galloping speed read of the last half of the book, nosing out little truffles in inspiration. Alain de Botton is to philosophy as hot water is to the back. But more than anything it got me thinking about the terrible paradoxes that I accept without a blink.  There are so many of them, but I'm going to pick out a few.

Take Rudolf Steiner.  We sent our children to a Steiner school, and I'm glad we did. I've also read a lot of Steiner, almost equally divided between stuff that made sense with a certain amount of unentanglement, and stuff that was, to any rational mind, absolutely barking. No I take that back, most of it reads as absolutely barking, but it did produce this amazing education, that works with the whole child. So I'm trying to disentangle some of this. here's my lists of disentanglement (but don't worry back to Unbearable Lightness of Being and Essays in Love reasonably soon).

So:
The Steiner Paradox
1. Steiner school based on huge number of estoric writings and lectures from Steiner, ranging from angels to burying cow horns in fields as part of  bio dynamic agriculture, very difficult to make sense of. Child viewed as coming into their physical bodies not yet full incarnated. Child, 3-7 years old,  needs lots of play , rhythm, song, dance, colour, wonder, beauty.  Does not need TV and plastic toys and computer games.

2. Only the last two sentences are in anyway believable as a basis for an education BUT they do make sense, and that is why Steiner schools are wonderful places for the younger child, and certainly benefited all of ours.

Alright as far as it goes, can live with the esoteric stuff in the background, can see the results in the children - especially now we know many Steiner kids who grown up in their twenties and thirties.

Then there:
The What Am I paradox
1. I grew up in a miasma of half-baked beliefs, kind of twirled round in Christianity, certainly with hopes of an immortal soul, certainly with the sense of religion as a past it relic of ignorant ages, but most certainly of all without a clue as to how to live.

2. Seems likely we are just the sum total of the neuroscience of the brain (and other bits), but like the universe we are essentially emergent, I am the rather wonderful total of the atoms that make me up, albeit with the freedom to move think and express myself in different ways.

But I still search for meaning, the right questions, the right behaviours if not the right answers. I exist in a tepid pool of half baked agnosticism which is little better than hopeful atheism.

Then there is
 The Love Paradox

1. Tomas, answers, when being pressured to sign a statement reinforcing the letter that got him sacked from his job as a surgeon in Czechoslovakia (the Russians have already tried and failed to make him sign a retraction).

“It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground," he said, "than to send petitions to a president.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Whatever it means, I feel the same, even though I will happily shoot crows, rabbits etc to eat them - that's something completely different. It is the impulse of love that is important.

2. And soooo, back to Essays in Love where  where? fuck me! Looking for the quote I wanted in Google, to save typing it  all out, I searched for "categories of mature and immature love quotes" and found this from OSHo, the Bagwan, the Orange guy with all the Rolls Royces, you remember him in the seventies! 
It says about the same as De Botton, with a little more panache actually.  But bits of De Botton are worth quoting, particularly since he does express it rather well too: 

"The philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful and reciprocated [and perhaps explain why most people who have known desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love]. Immature love on the other hand [though it has little to do with age] is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy & beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature [because absolute] love comes into death, symbolic or real: the climax of mature love comes in marriage..."
Essays in Love p 202

I've left out a last rather stupid clever clogs clause tacked onto the end, about calling marriage "the attempt to avouch death via routine [the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote controlled appliances]"   I don't think it is that - but then I'm lucky in that respect. And there is also a sense, and call me a romantic if you will, because that would be correct, that mature marriage in love doesn't stop a lot of immature behaviour on my part certainly, but it does flow through into a sense of absolute bliss, plenty of romance left  in there which appears in bright, light moments, and in quietness as well.  

still rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being...

... as I am still rereading Shikasta, in bits when I feel like it, until suddenly  I get a momentum so that I keep going. What struck me today in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as I read in the late morning having come in from the town and a bitter wind, enough to get me up again and in front of the screen to start writing, was this:

"Here he was doing things he didn't give a damn about, and enjoying it"

This is by comparison to his previous profession as a surgeon ( the post 1968 Soviet backed authorities have forced him to resign because he will not sign a retraction of a letter critical of the Soviets) when:

"Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep"

Tomas is just doing stuff (window-cleaning) , without weighty responsibility, but with a nice weighty hangover of respect from his previous occupation, and from his refusal to retract.  It reminds me of having a migraine when I was working, not in the times when I grimly hung on and worked through it, but when I was able to go home and climb into bed between cool sheets and lie down with nothing but thudding pain to occupy my mind, as the nausea used to fade as soon as I was able to lie down.  I would be able to perch just on the edge of sleep with the pain carefully balanced, as it felt, at the edge of my forehead, pushed out from consciousness although still a presence. That effort meant that I couldn't think about anything else - or the pain would trample its way back in - and in its own way it was a delightful precipice to lie on, it felt white, soft and above all, safe.