home, sweet home?

after for sitting in a plane for fifteen hours, it took two and a half hours more to get our luggage and then: yes, you're right; you caught me! i was going to explode america with an unopened bottle of limoncello and some face cream! but not with my perfume or ink pens, so it's a good thing customs missed those.

as i waited for my flat tire to get fixed this morning (ah, virginia and my cars), i was reading an essay from percy's signposts in a strange land. he is discussing as usual the state of modernity, the nature of its malady and the problem of perceiving reality and sanity. nietzsche (darling seductive philosophies of nieztsche) first stated that life is nausea, but insisted that the antidote is art, specifically music. sartre tacitly refutes this in nausea, because if life is nausea, then too is art because true art is an imitation of life. the problem of modern man is the autonomous, isolating narcissism. without objective, impersonal truths greater than the individual, reality will cease to have any meaning and the resulting state is percy's main character (all the same; just variations on a theme), who all attempt to discover and address the fundamental problem of the unhappy success. percy, a convert to Catholicism, approaches these from a dynasty of suicides--he frequently implies he is an "ex-suicide"--and struggled with this his whole life, along with alcoholism. recovering alcoholics are some of the most marvelous individuals. they have no patience for lies, equivocation, or rationalisation. of necessity they have learned to see reality for what it is and deal with it on their own terms. i've known more addicts than i care to think about. they are usually brilliant, either scientifically or artistically, and are always beautiful. a poet may be the most wounded of men, but it is the wounded man who has the best view of the battle (percy). and so it goes around again to the fundamentals: love and suffering. until one is willing to suffer for love, and until one realizes the value and beauty of suffering and ceases to fear it, one will be caught in the nauseating stratosphere of life ... and i know i'm rambling now but how very cathartic it is ...