Dear Reader!
I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted!
This time of year, the holidays, the deadlines… I hope you had a joyful Thanksgiving with friends and loved ones, and now Hanukkah! Chag Hanukkah Sameach!! (So early this year!)
This week I have two short poems for you from 1951. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Hannah Arendt’s distinction in The Human Condition between eternity and immortality. She argues that we’ve forsaken the pursuit of immortal fame for the pursuit of everlasting life on earth.
But for Arendt life in itself was not the highest good. As she put it in an early essay from 1941, “We who are alive have to learn that you can’t live on your knees, that you don’t become immortal by chasing after life, and that if you are no longer willing to die for anything, you will die for having done nothing.”
I often return to these lines in Arendt, because I think in a way they represent her at her most political. It is a call to courageous action in dark times. And so, perhaps you too can take nourishment from them during these longer, darker days.
Yours,
Sam
Reflections