Sticky in Chennai

I have realized that most of our readers prefer Esmerelda’s posts about fruit juice and dogs to my sociological and theological ramblings, but to enjoy her posts you will have to occasionally suffer one of my own.

Esmerelda has appropriated our copy of the Mahabharata. (She is tearing through it at an admirable pace.) So I have been forced to pick up something else. On a whim I purchased a book that caught my eye: The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang. I am only a few pages into it but I am already deeply in love. One quote that left me in smiles all morning:

“The sense of humor … seems to be very closely related to the sense of reality or realism. If the joker is often cruel in disillusioning the idealist, he nevertheless performs a very important function right there by not letting the idealist bump his head against the stone wall of reality and receive a ruder shock. He also gently eases the tension of the hot-headed enthusiast and makes him live longer. By preparing him for disillusion, there is probably less pain in the final impact, for a humorist is always like a man charged with the duty of breaking sad news gently to a dying patient… If idealism and disillusion must necessarily go together in this world, we must say that life is cruel, rather than the joker who reminds us of life’s cruelty.

I have often thought of formulas by which the mechanism of human progress and historical change can be expressed. They seem to be as follows:

Reality – Dreams = Animal Being
Reality + Dreams = Heart-ache (usually called Idealism)
Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)
Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism
Dreams + Humor = Fantasy
Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom"

Brilliant.