Ten twenty five. My senior year English teacher set a bad example, being rather a pervert. High school was kind of like that. The Spanish teacher the same year had a dubious personal life, never getting married and flirting with all the men. But people such as they, and everybody, need a merciful savior the like of Jesus Christ. Me, too. The foibles of the people I’ve met, including myself, are enough to make me cry. They make me wish I could be some other animal than a human being. Yet where does this feeling of shame come from?
People ought to be proud and bold, worshiping the human form as divine beyond all conception. This was the sentiment that raised Ancient Greece to the pinnacle of civilization. Those people, like Narcissus, saw their reflection in the water and fell in love with their own image. Humanity became an end in itself; and really, the spirit of the Renaissance was much the same. They revived antiquity and reveled in the joy and beauty of being alive and, above all, human. They did not despise themselves, spitting in their own eye. Life was Michelangelo, the human form exalted to divinity. The Renaissance was to be reborn to the perfect life.
Then what is this sense of shame, treading on cigarette butts and fast food litter on our journey to the convenience store? Whither fled the glory and gleam of this vision of human potential? Where is there a pool wherein to view our own beauty once again? Where is our New Renaissance?
robgradens 