2008年9月19日星期五
心需要呵护
给公司忙助学金的事情，今天终于可以平静了。其实，公司早已知道，资助金发出去了，感谢的人只会是少数，可谓用寒心来形容。而我，这段时间的郁闷，只是不肯接受这个事实而已。现在，我也坦然接受了，毕竟，感恩，是一件很困难的事情，特别是在今天这样的一个社会里，有些人连公司的善意资助都不相信，还能让人说什么呢？人世间，任何领域都难逃世态炎凉，人情冷暖，若能看透这一点，必会让人少一些伤害和感伤。可能也正是因为这种境况，于是，人的努力，人对爱的赋予他人，也就变得更加的有意义和有一份难去的厚重感。也许，正是这份爱的努力，让一些有心去爱的人，更加有勇气去追求一些东西，去做出一些东西。一个人在呵护他人的同时，也在呵护自己的心，让自己的心，不至于枯竭，生命在爱中得以流淌~~~~~
2008年9月17日星期三
落寞
闹哄哄的事情差不多忙完了，也冷清了，在这中秋里，一个人，独自在寝室里，听着音乐。始终伴随我的只有那无尽音乐，诉说不完的情愫。妈妈独自一人在家乡，对窗无眠，辛苦地把两个孩子拉扯大，读完大学，却依然只是自己一人过着许久已来的中秋。多少个中秋，都是妈妈一人，空对壁，弟弟在江苏工作，而我在吉林继续读那没完没了的书，一家三人，天各一方，不知道生活，如此下去，究竟为了什么？？？弟弟的七八年的女友分手了，自己的感情也如镜花水月，亦真亦幻，终究不敢落脚他乡，终究在命运的折磨与心灵的煎熬着，过着无法欢颜的日子。也许，只有音乐才能相伴着心，触摸着感伤的心，安抚着细腻的灵知，去找寻自己的慰藉，生命的慰藉，爱的慰藉！
2008年9月6日星期六
The Real Leo Strauss
By JENNY STRAUSS CLAY
Published: June 7, 2003
Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ''cabal'' (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles.
My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago. He was a conservative insofar as he did not think that change is necessarily change for the better.
Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws, he felt it was the best form of government that could be realized, ''the last best hope.'' He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism -- in our time, Nazism and Communism -- which is predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one's own. His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln. He was not an observant Jew, but he loved the Jewish people and he saw the establishment of Israel as essential to their survival.
To me, what characterized him above all else was his total lack of vanity and self-importance. As a result, he had no interest in honors within the academy, and was completely unsuited to political ambition. His own earliest passion, he confessed, was to spend his life raising rabbits (Flemish Giants) and reading Plato.
He was first and foremost a teacher. He did not seek to mold people in his own image. Rather, he was devoted to helping young people see the world as it is, in all its misery and splendor. The objects of his teaching were the Great Books, those works generally recognized as the foundation of a liberal education. But that alone was not a sufficient reason for reading them.
He began where good teachers should begin, from his students' received opinions, in order to scrutinize their foundation. At that time, as is still true today, academia leaned to the left; hence such questioning required an examination of the left's tenets. Had the prevailing beliefs been different, they too would have been subject to his skeptical inquiry.
Among the received opinions of the time was an unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment, or ''relativism.'' Many young people were confused, without a compass, with nothing substantial to admire. My father's turning them to the Great Books was thus motivated not merely by aesthetic or antiquarian interest, but by a search for an understanding of mankind's present predicament: what were its sources and what, if any, were the alternatives? The latter he found in the writings of the ancient Greeks.
Furthermore, he insistently confronted his students with the question of the ''good life.'' For him, the choice boiled down to the life in accordance with Revelation or the life according to Reason -- Jerusalem versus Athens. The vitality of Western tradition, he felt, lay in the invigorating tension between the two.
My father saw reading not as a passive exercise but as taking part in an active dialogue with the great minds of the past. One had to read with great care, great respect, and try, as he always said, to ''understand the author as he understood himself.'' Today this task, admittedly difficult and demanding, is dismissed in fashionable academia as impossible. Rather, we are told, each reader inevitably constructs his own text over which the author has no control, and the writer's intentions are irrelevant.
The fact is that Leo Strauss also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his authors to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed; others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father's rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy.
Although I was never a student of my father's, I sat in on a class of his in the 1960's; I think it was on Xenophon's ''Cyropaedia.'' He was a small, unprepossessing and, truth be told, ugly man (daughters are their parents' worst critics), with none of the charisma that one associates with ''great teachers.'' And yet there was something utterly charming. One of the students would read little chunks of the text, and my father would comment and call for discussion. What marked this class was a combination of an engagement with questions of the highest seriousness (in this case, what is the best form of government) with the laughter of intellectual play.
It was magic. If only the truth had the power to make the misrepresentations of his achievement vanish like smoke and dust.
website:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E1D61639F934A35755C0A9659C8B63
By JENNY STRAUSS CLAY
Published: June 7, 2003
Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ''cabal'' (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles.
My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago. He was a conservative insofar as he did not think that change is necessarily change for the better.
Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws, he felt it was the best form of government that could be realized, ''the last best hope.'' He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism -- in our time, Nazism and Communism -- which is predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one's own. His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln. He was not an observant Jew, but he loved the Jewish people and he saw the establishment of Israel as essential to their survival.
To me, what characterized him above all else was his total lack of vanity and self-importance. As a result, he had no interest in honors within the academy, and was completely unsuited to political ambition. His own earliest passion, he confessed, was to spend his life raising rabbits (Flemish Giants) and reading Plato.
He was first and foremost a teacher. He did not seek to mold people in his own image. Rather, he was devoted to helping young people see the world as it is, in all its misery and splendor. The objects of his teaching were the Great Books, those works generally recognized as the foundation of a liberal education. But that alone was not a sufficient reason for reading them.
He began where good teachers should begin, from his students' received opinions, in order to scrutinize their foundation. At that time, as is still true today, academia leaned to the left; hence such questioning required an examination of the left's tenets. Had the prevailing beliefs been different, they too would have been subject to his skeptical inquiry.
Among the received opinions of the time was an unquestioned faith in progress and science combined with a queasiness regarding any kind of moral judgment, or ''relativism.'' Many young people were confused, without a compass, with nothing substantial to admire. My father's turning them to the Great Books was thus motivated not merely by aesthetic or antiquarian interest, but by a search for an understanding of mankind's present predicament: what were its sources and what, if any, were the alternatives? The latter he found in the writings of the ancient Greeks.
Furthermore, he insistently confronted his students with the question of the ''good life.'' For him, the choice boiled down to the life in accordance with Revelation or the life according to Reason -- Jerusalem versus Athens. The vitality of Western tradition, he felt, lay in the invigorating tension between the two.
My father saw reading not as a passive exercise but as taking part in an active dialogue with the great minds of the past. One had to read with great care, great respect, and try, as he always said, to ''understand the author as he understood himself.'' Today this task, admittedly difficult and demanding, is dismissed in fashionable academia as impossible. Rather, we are told, each reader inevitably constructs his own text over which the author has no control, and the writer's intentions are irrelevant.
The fact is that Leo Strauss also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his authors to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed; others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father's rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy.
Although I was never a student of my father's, I sat in on a class of his in the 1960's; I think it was on Xenophon's ''Cyropaedia.'' He was a small, unprepossessing and, truth be told, ugly man (daughters are their parents' worst critics), with none of the charisma that one associates with ''great teachers.'' And yet there was something utterly charming. One of the students would read little chunks of the text, and my father would comment and call for discussion. What marked this class was a combination of an engagement with questions of the highest seriousness (in this case, what is the best form of government) with the laughter of intellectual play.
It was magic. If only the truth had the power to make the misrepresentations of his achievement vanish like smoke and dust.
website:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E1D61639F934A35755C0A9659C8B63
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