Happiness Is Fleeting - Akira the Don

Happiness is fleeting

And suffering requires a sustaining meaning

Happiness is fleeting

And suffering requires a sustaining meaning

That place where the meaning and the fact are conjoined

That’s the proper place to lecture from

What you wanna do as an academic is tell your students

About something that you’ve encountered that you’ve fallen in love with

And to communicate the love that you have for that

And not to say, «Well, you should read this book.»

But to say, «Well, her’s this book, and here’s what it can open up for you and

this is how it dos it, this is what you’ll gain from it»

There’s something in it that’s of unbelievable utility, and you have to believe

that in order to communicate it

To communicate that commitment you have to beauty and to truth and to literature

It isn’t enough to say what they are and to transmit them

It’s to manifest yourself as a living part of that tradition

And to show yourself thereby as a model for living out what that tradition

represents, and to show that that’s so much better than

Like a short-term pleasure seeking nihilism

They’re not even in the same conceptual universe

And people are far more open to that, they know already

People know, especially when they’re hurt

They know that…

Happiness is fleeting

And suffering requires a sustaining meaning

They know, happiness is fleeting

And that suffering requires a sustaining meaning

King’s Chapel, the people who started it didn’t live to see its completion

They were driven by this nobility of transcended vision and they produced these

enduring forms

Out of the bloody misery of history

We’ve erected all this spectacular infrastructure that we’re so fortunate to be

part of

And none of that gratitude is taught, partly not taught because people have no

sense of the absolute catastrophe of history

It’s like nasty, brutish, and short

The simplest and most likely social circumstances

Catastrophe punctuated by hell

And to see that not happening in a sustained manner, constantly and to see

things improving around us and to be reliable in that manner and then not to be

grateful for that

It’s an unbelievable combination of ignorance, ingratitude, and willful

blindness

And to not instill that sense in young people for them to understand that they

are standing on the bones of generations of people who suffered to make this

possible

Despite all their errors and brought this forward

Happiness is fleeting

And suffering requires a sustaining meaning

They know, happiness is fleeting

And that suffering requires a sustaining meaning

We could concentrate on building the future, instead of criticizing the past

You start in the world if you have some wisdom and some humility

By taking the potential that lies dormant in front of you

And interacting with it in the Logos-like manner, with truth and with love

And by transforming that potential into whatever you can create out of it

that’s good

It won’t be small if you do that

You can transform your whole household by transforming your room

You can transform your whole neighborhood, by transforming your house

These things spread very, very rapidly

And that is right there in front of you

People think they’re impoverished, that they don’t have any opportunity

And the opportunity is hidden from them by their unwillingness to take the

steps that are necessary to put what they could put in front of them in order

And to produce the beauty instead of the ugliness, where they could do that

And I don’t think there is anything more powerful than that

That works

Happiness is fleeting

And suffering requires a sustaining meaning

They know, happiness is fleeting

And that suffering requires a sustaining meaning

Happiness is fleeting

And suffering requires a sustaining meaning

They know, happiness is fleeting

And that suffering requires a sustaining meaning

Everyone who’s lived knows that

And so to say, well here’s some bon for the suffering and it’s profound and deep

And here’s what it’s meant to me

And here’s how you can incorporate it into your life

People are absolutely starving for that, or dying of thirst for that