Mof'ers,
In my skim of Lila to find where freedom was mentioned one thing that occurred to me is
how closely freedom and time are interwoven. Like time, freedom is relative, conditional, and con
tingent.
The freedom to choose now is in part predicated on long string of past conditions (immediate,
recent, and distant) while the consequences of the choice lie unknown in the future. Man
struggles, eternally and futilely, to avoid this cycle. The story of Lila and Phaedrus's brief
journey together is a metaphor for life's eternal struggle with the consequences of choices. Their
journeys part a few days, or 406 pages later with Phaedrus talking to the sand and the wind:
"He stood on a mound of sand besides some juniper bushes and said, " Ahhhh! He threw out his
arms. FREE ! No idols, no Lila, no Rigel, no New York, no more America even. just FREE !" P406
He's "FREE!"
As Diana and Horse asked. "Free from what?
Free from the consequences of choices made in a bar in Kingston. Choices that in the cold dawn
seemed not nearly as good as they did by jukebox light. A few days and whole series of related
events and choices later, after scrambling away from a New York pier with a blood splatter Lila,
this spontaneous, those choices made in Kingston finally developed into a serious moral dilemma.
The lure of the novel is that it imitates our worldview of time. As we proceed from front to back a
continuous stream of events unfold dynamically as we read. The word you are experiencing, NOW, is
the dynamic, fleeting present, pages read ,the past, history; pages left the future, anticipated
but, unknown. Thomas Cahill claims there are only two basic worldviews of time. Early man had only
the "cyclical worldview" in which there are neither beginnings and endings but events happen over
and over again. As Henri-Charles Puech says of Greek thought in his seminal Man and Time:
"No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once....every events has been enacted, is enacted, will
be enacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at every turn o
f
the circle."
Sometime around 1850 BC one man and his descendants split from this view and slowly over thousands
of years the "processive worldview" of time developed and it is now it is the view "to which all
Western people subscribe." Cahill continues:
"We are looking here at one of the great turning point in history of human sensibility-at an
enormous value shift....by becoming the first people to live-psychologically- in real time, also
became the first people to value the New and to welcome Surprise. In doing this, they radically
subverted all other ancient worldviews.
"The past is no longer important just because it can be mined for exemplars but because it has
brought us to the present: it is the first part of our journey, ...But the moral is not that histor
y
repeats itself but that it is always something new: a process unfolding through time,...But what is
the present? Is it just a moment, glinting briefly between past and future, hardly worth elaboratin
g
on? No it is to be the pulsing , white-hot center of all the subsequent narrative, the unlikely
intersection of time and eternity,"
Or Dynamic Quality!
But what are the consequences of this shift in worldview about time as they relate to freedom?
Cahill claims this shift enabled the birth of the concept of freedom. Freedom is the concept that
your choices NOW have real consequence in the future not only in your experiences but those of oth
ers.
Trivia questions:
What was the name of the man who started this shift?
Who are his descendants?
And, an easy one for DMB:
What event led to his shift? and how would you characterize that event?
3WD
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