Necessary to reflect upon...

A long time ago, Cecil Day-Lewis wrote a poem with the title Moral, and quoted A.N. Whitehead in an epigraph:

“Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.”

Envy, wrote the poet, downgrades the envious one, not the one who is envied.  “The vision that keeps burning from/ Saintly trust, heroic deed,” is one that is necessary even though saints and heroes have not been perfect women and men.  The poet concludes:

Accept the flawed self, but aspire

To flights beyond it: wiser far

Lifting our eyes unto the hills

Than lowering them to sift the mire.

Sadly, in the world today, the way to catch attention, become the star of a movement, possibly gain material benefits, is by attacking some respected name from the past, a person who, being dead, cannot defend herself or himself.  The sorry condition of humankind at present, the constantly boiling cauldron of anger, hatred, violence even to the point of taking lives, is partly attributable to individuals having no steadfast commitment to an ideal, no goal to seek other than in the mire.

Ruth Heredia is the originator and holds the copyright to all material on this blog unless credited to some source. Please do not use it or pass it off as your own work. That is theft. If you wish to link it, quote it, or reprint in whole or in part, please be courteous enough to seek my permission.