“Bene vixit qui bene latuit [He who has hidden his life has lived well]” — Ovid
I often feel I am not made for this world, but for the Eternal. It's just that I don't truly fit in with anything, or at least I am often resigned to the fact that very few things will satisfy me in worldly affairs. Sure, I still occasionally yearn for the great romantic love, or a decent steak. But I've had a taste of these things and seen others have them to know they are not enduring. Only Truth endures.
The contracted ego is driven for preservation or augmentation. So it does not concern itself with the things that matter: love, art, death, reality, morality, tradition, myth, consciousness.
And most of us are operating from the vantage point of the contracted ego, so we muddle by half awake. Have noticed how trivial and banal most conversations have become? The only vivid thing I can connect with people on is humor. Humor does open the cracks, but only for a moment.
Technology is no longer neutral, and probably never was. On this, Heidegger was right. We can see how it overwhelms us with utilitarian priorities, numbs our awareness, debases nature and love, and overtakes all spheres of humanity that make us alive!
To this I say silence—or the elegant performance of it—is the only revolutionary act left. Any other 'plan' would be overdetermined. We can balk as reactionaries to all the stupor in the world, but in the end, that is mere ironic performance being enacted on the unstoppable momentum of entropy.
The hidden life can not be corrupted. It engages with life and is enchanted by it, but is not overcome with it.
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” — George Eliot