So who the hell are you?

You can be a William Shakespeare. Or perhaps you are a Wolfgang Mozart. Oh you may prefer to model yourself after Rembrandt van Rijn.

Perhaps you are none of the above, but rather a disoverer and admirer of all those beautiful treasures called art.

According to a silly Facebook test I did recently, I was a Christobal Columbus, because of a daring and adventurous streak I seemingly possess. Columbus wanted to explore the corners of the world. Or did he, as there is a 'slight' difference between discovering and taking over, and not just in maritime or military terms for that matter ... How about the field of love? Are you the Disoverer or the Conquerer?

This is where Ethics enters the scene and why reinvent a brilliant train of thought if some chap already said it before? So here goes:

'Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.' - Albert Schweitzer

There is no particular need to immediately sail out and discover the world. Start by exploring and expanding the corners of your own mind. Academic studies will broaden your mind only so far. But poetry, or poetic prose or prosaic verse ... aahh my dears, poetry will allow your soul to switch back and forth from being a hedonistic pleasure dome to a temple of grief and sensing, breathing, living all the motions in between.

'We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.' - from the 1989 motion picture Dead Poets' Society

And on this brilliant bombshell, I bid thee farewell. Or to rephrase this: later mate.


picture credits
London: Anthony Blond, 1968 (English translation), Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, Ltd., 1990 (Spanish version)