Excerpts from And Never Stop Dancing
“Like the famous three lies (“The check is in the mail,” “I love you,” and “That flight will be delayed about an hour.”), the important questions tell us something about ourselves and about the human condition. We may long to win the lottery or appear on national TV. What would really improve our lives is to laugh more, think about why we’re here, and let each other merge.”
“The conventional wisdom about marriage is that any intimate relationship is hard work and requires endless compromise and negotiation. This idea has always seemed to me to be more of a commentary on the marriage of the expert offering this platitude than a goal to which couples ought to aspire. At the risk of appearing hopelessly romantic and unrealistic, I maintain that a good marriage is easy provided that both people have been astute in the selection process. If we choose a partner with ample reserves of kindness and a willingness to place us at the center of his or her life, and if we have sufficiently cultivated those virtues in ourselves, we can refute the “hard work” school of marital advice, put down our picks and shovels, and partake of the endless pleasures of renewable love.”
“There are many forms of grace – physical, intellectual, social, spiritual – each of them amazing in its own way. But to cope with inevitable loss, to face life in all its confusion and absurdity and still retain the capacity for joy, laughter, and a belief that our struggles have meaning – this is to prevail”
“We are not often called upon to demonstrate courage by risking our lives. But in numberless acts of quiet determination in the face of the anxiety that now infects this society, we perform a service to our country and to each other. Collectively, our attitudes and behavior create the atmosphere we live in and, more than any military action, will ultimately determine the outcome of the struggle with terror in which we are now engaged. In the process we might at last find something in ourselves of which we can be truly proud.”
“What I am suggesting is that to focus our lives around the small or medium-sized questions and ignore the large ones is not a likely path to getting what we want. It is like looking at (or painting) a picture and concentrating exclusively on the foreground. It is spirituality that serves as the background and frame for our existence. We can hew to a religious dogma (any one will do) and hang around with those who believe similarly, or we can try to find elsewhere tentative answers that will enable us to make sense of our lives and live them in accord with our deepest values. Whether or not we will be rewarded in heaven, we will at least have something to guide us through the confusing maze we must daily navigate. It is only when we are too obtuse, frightened, or distracted to ask the important questions that we are truly lost.”
“To be mortal is to bear the awful weight of time and fate. It is in sharing this burden that we help ourselves no less than those whom we would help. We do this in an atmosphere of both pain and hope in an attempt, finally, to enable the pleasure that is also life’s gift.”
“On my fiftieth USMA reunion:
In the chapel at West Point, as before the black granite wall in Washington, I remember my classmates dead in Vietnam, eternally young, immortal in my mortal mind. They will not grow old and frail like the rest of us. They will not linger on beds of pain. Perhaps, after all, they are the lucky ones. But what of the songs unsung, the children and grandchildren unborn, the peaceful pleasures of longtime love. These things they were denied.
The circle, it seems, is never closed. I fear that young men and women are still dying for reasons that, fifty years from now, will cause another group of old graduates to honor their memories, as did we, with devotion and regret, the deepest form of sorrow.”
“People can concentrate on only one idea at a time. If we are preoccupied with superficialities, we are unlikely to reflect on what is important. If we value entertainment over enlightenment, we sacrifice our only chance at a real understanding of what works. We are thereby prevented from modifying our behavior in response to experience, which is the very definition of learning. If we cannot learn, we become little more than a collection of unexamined habits and prejudices, subject to the mindless repetition of past mistakes. Does this sound like a prescription for happiness?”
“It is a valuable journey, this ascent from collectors of information to purveyors of knowledge who hope to become wise. Even though none of us completes it, the effort to do so dignifies our existence as something more that the accumulation of material goods and the relentless pursuit of our own self-interest. And by making the effort we come a little closer to answering for ourselves the fundamental question of human existence: Why, after all, are we here?”
“It’s not surprising that when we contemplate our mortality we tend to feel a little desperate about being remembered. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” Bob Dylan said. His music will not be buried with him.”
