We are doing nothing today except for swimming and napping. This morning I enjoyed a Cuban cigar while sitting on a wave breaker. It was difficult to decide to concentrate on the dozen or so wildly colorful fish at my feet or the captivating horizon.
Taking a sabbath forces you reconcile yourself with not doing anything. I am obsessed with defining myself with and by what I do. When these have been removed, it makes me ask, “Who the hell am I?”
Last night we had a power outage so we took to opportunity to step outside and look at the amazing night sky. The stars are incredibly bright down here and the rolling waves provide an apt soundtrack.
Today we went to Paya del Carmen, did a wee bit of shopping and then took the ferry over to the island of Cozumel. My shirt selection today was my Brazil soccer shirt, which proved to be my identification marker as the market sellers all called me by “Hey Brazil, come see my shop,” or “Hey Brazil, let me sell you some Mexican junk back here.”
At Cozumel we rented a Jeep with the instructions, “Don’t drive drunk and don’t let any kids drive.” We did get rained on, but thoroughly enjoyed the drive along the coast.
We have not ventured from far from the condo we are staying in yet, but here is the view from our patio:
Just found this today, even though its been around for over a year. It is a blog written by C.S. Lewis scholars on his life and writings. Looks like interesting stuff.
“Redemption remains a vague rumour, and only those possessed of a true light-hearted folly will dare to abandon everything else in order to pursue it.”
|| John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and pardon
Justice is never found in the present order, is never present to itself, is never gathered unto itself. Justice is rather the relation to the other, the dis-juncture that opens the space for the incoming of the other. The essence of justice, thus, is to have no essence, to be in disequilibrium, perpetually disproportionate with itself, never to be adequate to itself, never identical with itself. Justice never exists, and that is essential to justice, for justice . . . is the impossible, our passion, which we desire with a desire beyond desire, what we love like made. Justice calls, justice is to come, but justice does not exist. Indeed, it would be the height of injustice to think that justice exists, that it existed once in Greece whose true sons are Germans, or that it is here, for example, in the good old U.S.A., in the middle of American apartheid, the National Rifle Association, the unimaginable violence of our streets, the growing extremes of poverty and wealth, and the demoralizing, demagogic degradation and corruption of democracy that we witness with every political campaign. Justice haunts us, disturbs our sleep, stalks us like the specter of old Marx whom we can’t quite bury, keeps us up pacing the floors well into the night, has us seeing ghosts. The specter of justice disturbs the assured distinction between what is and what is not, between to be and not to be, which is a bit of sleeplessness over being about which we can be instructed rather better by Hamlet than by Heidegger.
|| John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, p. 154-5
