I haven't read it, though I am fairly sympathetic to the whole 'philosophy as a way of life' antidote to the scholasticism of the moment.
In case I gave another impression, I never thought you rejected scholarship! It was more of an extended musing on the ways that the mode of expression you wish to grope towards was difficult even in the age of classical daoism, but they did manage it. Your thoughts resonate because I would also like to manage that difficult trick!
Scholarship has great potential for unifying a tradition. But even within singular traditions broadly conceived there are, of course, rival schools of scholarship. It never seems to end! The postmodern problem of foundations isn't a recent problem, to say the least. It is almost as if we only find cultural cooperation with one another (more or less) when we have no other choice! It is worth taking notice of the times when we actually might transcend our ambitious and contentious tendencies. Not even having a Pope (literal or figurative) seems to solve the problem. Though, come to think of it, even if I were a hermit, I would find rival schools at loggerheads. So I practice non-contention. Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching inspires me, but are we capable of it?
'Let the state be small and the people few': I doubt we are capable collectively of choosing it, yet I am fairly sure it will come back around to that anyway
That's my hunch as well. It will be a rough transition, no doubt.
I tend to fret about what I imagine to be this larger civilizational trajectory stemming from the will-to-power and the inescapable urge to control and exploit. I get hung up on trying to figure out a remedy. Which is laughable on my part. There probably isn't one, except on a small scale. It is what attracts me to poetry of the Chinese Zen and Taoist poets. Or the Desert Fathers.
It isn't even so much to prepare for "what's coming". I am not sure most of us even could do that, if we really understood what that means. But rather to live towards the Original Harmony as best as we can *right now*. That's what we are meant to be doing anyway. Whether we are living at the shaky heights of a technological civilization or some Zen poet/hermit a 1,000 years ago in the mountains of China.
The latter sounds more appealing to me now anyway.
Jack. I felt envy as I read your blog. Internally, it’s what I yearn for, and yet while I was there, I found the silence deafening. Without all my distractions, I found myself experiencing uncomfortable emotions and the war in my head! Sad indeed. I did leave with the determination to unplug more from things that make my brain mushy and lean into cultivating beauty and authenticity in mind and soul. I’m thankful for your thoughts. They remind me of that determination.
Heidi- I know exactly what you mean about uncomfortable emotions and the war in our heads. I will offer, for what it is worth, two basic points:
1) We live in a civilization that, in its essence, only offers and even *can* only promote distraction. As the old joke goes, deep down we are shallow. Distraction is a drug. We live in, as Cardinal Sarah has it, a Dictatorship of Noise. I believe our imaginations, emotions and cognitive capacities have been and continue to be poisoned by a media machine that has anything but our best interests at heart. It thrives on inflaming our passions and attachments. It's what keeps the whole machine running.
2) Silence is an actual territory. It isn't merely an absence of noise (though that is, obviously, a necessary condition for silence). We need both a good map and a guide into the territory itself.
As for the first, we are inundated with maps, i.e., books, videos, podcasts, and substack blogs! by dubious individuals, even! etc. and from all manner of perspectives and traditions. It is very difficult, if sometimes seemingly impossible, to figure out which one to follow. The profusion of maps into the territory of silence becomes, ironically, a major source of noise in and of itself. But I believe that there are good maps, we just need to find them.
A good map, however, is hardly enough. One must actually enter the territory of silence. This is where things can get difficult, as we are faced with the reality of ourselves and our lives instead of the false ideal of who we are that we carry around in our heads most of the time. For that, it is best to have an experienced guide who knows the territory and its dangers well. This, alas, is far more difficult to find. As most everyone is also reeling and confused from living in the deep shallowness of our misguided civilization. Even if only in narrow aspects, there are such guides out there. Again, the issue is how to find one, and a guide we can trust. There are a lot of charlatans.
All that said, we can also just begin in small doses. Even just a 10 minutes a day of turning of the outrage machine of smartphones, internet etc., can work wonders.
Finally, I am interested in how we create zones of silence for ourselves and others. I mentioned to you when you were up here about my interest in "lay monasticism". I don't know yet what that would look like, but it is worth thinking about.
Please forgive my boldness in this response. I hope some of it, anyway, is useful.
Sounds like a lovely memory. Ireland is certainly the place for finding the sacred. I live in the Kingdom (Kerry). Apparently they say there's two kingdoms: The Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Kerry! There's plenty of God here though!
I feel truly grateful to live in a place where on a clear night the stars make a masterpiece of the sky. We have a large window where in the cold winter months my children and I sit in candle light looking at star charts and trying to figure out the constellations. Having grown up in a town I know very little about the stars other than their beauty; my children's excitement is a contagion driving my learning.
Thanks for the wonderful post Jack and introducing me to Chinese poetry.
Naomi- I am reminded of walking back late one night from the Marine Bar on the outskirts of Dungarvan, Ireland many years ago. There was no real competition at all from artificial lights and the stars were marvellous and deep (the "few" pints of Guinness didn't hurt either). Me and two Irish lasses. They were singing Irish songs. A truly beautiful night of my life. -Jack
Naomi- I dug out my star chart this morning. I want to better know the constellations. If I wake up in the wee hours hopefully it will be clear out. Enjoy your own stargazing! -Jack
A lovely observation, thanks Jack. Seems like you are putting your monastic experience to good use and i look forward to hearing how it unfolds! God bless you.
I have been thinking about the Zhuangzi quote you posted a few days ago. I have long admired the clarity, and vivid terseness of the Classical Chinese poets. Red Pine's translation of the Tao Te Ching was a revelation to me.
I am caught in para-scholarly discursive modes of expression. This is what has me stuck in thinking about the Anthropocene. The scholarly mode--the "white paper" is the mode par excellence of the Anthropocene. Something else is required of us.
I wonder if Christianity wouldn't be better expressed in a way closer to the Tao Te Ching and the Chinese poets? As I mentioned to Clara elsewhere in these comments, I am rereading Christ the Eternal Tao. This is the best example of such a way of expressing the Way that I know. I think we need more. I do. -Jack
The reason it is resolvable is that the Laozi and Zhuangzi are not pre-scholarly texts, but the products of a period of extremely scholarly philosophical investigation and debate (although, as in Greece, it was primarily an oral tradition of scholarship). Even terse sentences in the Laozi can have a huge amount of scholarly weight behind them.
For instance, the opening of chapter 3, 'Not preferring the worthy allows people to not argue', is a direct reversal of Mozi's 'prefer the worthy', which was central to a competing and fully elaborated philosophical position. There is also some evidence that this sentence was a later addition to the chapter, which further illustrates how the text was produced from within a complex interplay of scholarly traditions.
Yet one doesn't need to know about Mozi at all to feel the line's power, both in its truth and in its reversal of 'common sense'. The scholarly rejection of scholarship itself allows the Laozi to reject the scholarly mode of expression, and that rejection has allowed it to address both 'philosophical' and 'religious' audiences for millennia.
Of course, saying that a rhetorical art is possible because Zhuangzi and Laozi did it is a bit like saying that breakthroughs in fundamental physics are possible because Einstein made them. They do, however, show a way.
In terms of Christian expression, Kierkegaard comes to mind, although he is very verbose compared to the Chinese classics! Perhaps CS Lewis and Chesterton are closer models, with their taste for paradox and ability to leave intellectual vanity at the door when writing.
I suspect, though, that you are very much closer to the Christian version of the Laozi than I am. I think of the desert fathers and the early monastic texts, especially Bernard's Steps of Humility and Pride: ''The first step of pride is curiosity'. I know this comment illustrates the depths of my own weakness in that particular regard, but so it goes.
The neglect of the monastics when teaching philosophy and the humanities in Western universities is, I think, deeply revealing. 'Here are the classics - don't worry about this millennia, nothing much happened there - ah, Descartes (or, if they are very brave, a cartoonish and inaccurate Aquinas)'.
I try to be charitable, but it feels like the choice of cowards who lack the intellectual resources to refute a fundamentally contrary position, but who dare not admit it has not been refuted. Of course, at this point, most of the professors are themselves ignorant of even the Greek and Roman classics; so it is seldom their choice.
I think you would very much like a book called 'The Gourd and the Cross' by Sung-hae Kim. She is both a Catholic nun and a professor of Chinese religion, and the book is about Daoism and Christianity. I'm not entirely sure what I've done with my copy, but I remember it being good.
Thank you. For what it is worth, I don’t reject scholarship. I do have reservations about it, certainly. It is powerful within its sphere and of great usefulness for clarifying what is unclear. I thought about studying philosophy in college, but it was the scholarly mode that deterred me. I went for music instead.
Have you read What is Ancient Philosophy? Which is, of course, a work of scholarship. It is a book that very much resonated with me. What we, certainly I, lack is not access to scholarship--which has never been more accessible--but to practices and a way of life that grounds us in, dare I say it, reality. That is what interests me. That is what I am always groping towards.
Thank you for being here and for your contributions. -Jack
My Buddhist teacher often says, the only ignorance we are allowed on the path is the belief in Enlightenment. He thus resolves, in my mind, the conflict in so many aspiring practitioners’ minds - trying to reconcile the ultimate and the relative. This is in response to your comment about “the first step of pride is curiousity”. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t have to get rid of all our failings at once. There is a path and steps. What is an achievement on one step becomes an obstacle and will need to be discarded on the next, and it continues until we reach the end of the path, which, because this description is from a Buddhist path, is Enlightenment, whatever that might mean. This knowledge encourages patience, humility, perseverance etc because we don’t have to get everything right, now.
And of course, the big bombshell is, what? belief in Enlightenment is an ignorance? (in Buddhism, ignorance doesn’t have a moral value to it, it just means an obscuration, a wrong view). I’ll leave it to each individual to know what that means. I feel this letting go of what we considered an achievement at an earlier stage, involves a lot of staring into the abyss type of thing, a kind of dark night of the soul. The darkness and the abyss just gets deeper and more subtle along the way.
I received "Through the Eyes of a Stranger" today. Hopefully I will be starting it soon. I am still grappling with if is possible to escape the Leibowitzian dilemma.
I've been thinking about that book, both of them actually. I think that Will B doesn't believe in sin, and so his book doesn't really grapple with the full depth of what I believe about human nature. On the other hand the 'Canticle' author was ultimately overwhelmed by his own depression and so I am guessing that he may have had a darker view of us and our lives than what I believe to be full reality. Sorry, that sounds too dismissive and I don't mean it that way.
My experience of God Himself has left me with abiding hope, though I struggle to stay in that reality. It is the deepest, truest reality and the one that "feels" authentic to me. I can understand hopelessness but it doesn't feel trustworthy. It diminishes God. Maybe that is just me being naive.
Clara- I don't believe you are being naive at all. To think that the Leibowitizian dilemma can be "solved" is likely to be on the wrong track entirely (I am guilty as charged). Those that dismiss our fallenness are the one's being naive. But we can live simply. We can seek first the Kingdom of God. Consider the Ravens! As I read it, Mt. 6:24-34, Jesus is asking something quite radical from us. He is asking us to trust in God completely and not hedge our bets and trust our own powers. It seems impossible for us to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, but there it is! We can't serve God and Mammon. We must choose.
I see glimpses of it in Classical Chinese poetry and in the Tao Te Ching. I am rereading Christ the Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene and he lays out the path of the Logos/Tao. I need a deeper understand of what hope really is. It surely isn't about everything working out according to my ego desires. -Jack
My favorite sentence: "We are obscured from the cosmic situation in which we find ourselves and are befuddled. "
I have often had that same feeling when out at night in suburbia... I know there are many people here but all I hear is compressors (ac units) and all I see are the flickers in the windows. Maybe it is worse than befuddled.
Clara- The whole idea of the suburbs is a strange one. The 'burbs used to at least kind of look nice. Not so much anymore. But in either case the suburbs seem to be the pleasant architecture of loneliness. I have spent most of my life there. -Jack
I haven't read it, though I am fairly sympathetic to the whole 'philosophy as a way of life' antidote to the scholasticism of the moment.
In case I gave another impression, I never thought you rejected scholarship! It was more of an extended musing on the ways that the mode of expression you wish to grope towards was difficult even in the age of classical daoism, but they did manage it. Your thoughts resonate because I would also like to manage that difficult trick!
Scholarship has great potential for unifying a tradition. But even within singular traditions broadly conceived there are, of course, rival schools of scholarship. It never seems to end! The postmodern problem of foundations isn't a recent problem, to say the least. It is almost as if we only find cultural cooperation with one another (more or less) when we have no other choice! It is worth taking notice of the times when we actually might transcend our ambitious and contentious tendencies. Not even having a Pope (literal or figurative) seems to solve the problem. Though, come to think of it, even if I were a hermit, I would find rival schools at loggerheads. So I practice non-contention. Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching inspires me, but are we capable of it?
'Let the state be small and the people few': I doubt we are capable collectively of choosing it, yet I am fairly sure it will come back around to that anyway
That's my hunch as well. It will be a rough transition, no doubt.
I tend to fret about what I imagine to be this larger civilizational trajectory stemming from the will-to-power and the inescapable urge to control and exploit. I get hung up on trying to figure out a remedy. Which is laughable on my part. There probably isn't one, except on a small scale. It is what attracts me to poetry of the Chinese Zen and Taoist poets. Or the Desert Fathers.
It isn't even so much to prepare for "what's coming". I am not sure most of us even could do that, if we really understood what that means. But rather to live towards the Original Harmony as best as we can *right now*. That's what we are meant to be doing anyway. Whether we are living at the shaky heights of a technological civilization or some Zen poet/hermit a 1,000 years ago in the mountains of China.
The latter sounds more appealing to me now anyway.
Jack. I felt envy as I read your blog. Internally, it’s what I yearn for, and yet while I was there, I found the silence deafening. Without all my distractions, I found myself experiencing uncomfortable emotions and the war in my head! Sad indeed. I did leave with the determination to unplug more from things that make my brain mushy and lean into cultivating beauty and authenticity in mind and soul. I’m thankful for your thoughts. They remind me of that determination.
Heidi- I know exactly what you mean about uncomfortable emotions and the war in our heads. I will offer, for what it is worth, two basic points:
1) We live in a civilization that, in its essence, only offers and even *can* only promote distraction. As the old joke goes, deep down we are shallow. Distraction is a drug. We live in, as Cardinal Sarah has it, a Dictatorship of Noise. I believe our imaginations, emotions and cognitive capacities have been and continue to be poisoned by a media machine that has anything but our best interests at heart. It thrives on inflaming our passions and attachments. It's what keeps the whole machine running.
2) Silence is an actual territory. It isn't merely an absence of noise (though that is, obviously, a necessary condition for silence). We need both a good map and a guide into the territory itself.
As for the first, we are inundated with maps, i.e., books, videos, podcasts, and substack blogs! by dubious individuals, even! etc. and from all manner of perspectives and traditions. It is very difficult, if sometimes seemingly impossible, to figure out which one to follow. The profusion of maps into the territory of silence becomes, ironically, a major source of noise in and of itself. But I believe that there are good maps, we just need to find them.
A good map, however, is hardly enough. One must actually enter the territory of silence. This is where things can get difficult, as we are faced with the reality of ourselves and our lives instead of the false ideal of who we are that we carry around in our heads most of the time. For that, it is best to have an experienced guide who knows the territory and its dangers well. This, alas, is far more difficult to find. As most everyone is also reeling and confused from living in the deep shallowness of our misguided civilization. Even if only in narrow aspects, there are such guides out there. Again, the issue is how to find one, and a guide we can trust. There are a lot of charlatans.
All that said, we can also just begin in small doses. Even just a 10 minutes a day of turning of the outrage machine of smartphones, internet etc., can work wonders.
Finally, I am interested in how we create zones of silence for ourselves and others. I mentioned to you when you were up here about my interest in "lay monasticism". I don't know yet what that would look like, but it is worth thinking about.
Please forgive my boldness in this response. I hope some of it, anyway, is useful.
-Jack
Sounds like a lovely memory. Ireland is certainly the place for finding the sacred. I live in the Kingdom (Kerry). Apparently they say there's two kingdoms: The Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Kerry! There's plenty of God here though!
It's truly wonderful to read these contemplations. Thanks, Jack.
It's just getting dark here...the clouds are taking centre stage tonight though! Hoping that your sky is clearer than mine come the night!
Ah, alas. Perhaps tomorrow night. Too early to tell here. We shall see.
I feel truly grateful to live in a place where on a clear night the stars make a masterpiece of the sky. We have a large window where in the cold winter months my children and I sit in candle light looking at star charts and trying to figure out the constellations. Having grown up in a town I know very little about the stars other than their beauty; my children's excitement is a contagion driving my learning.
Thanks for the wonderful post Jack and introducing me to Chinese poetry.
Naomi- I am reminded of walking back late one night from the Marine Bar on the outskirts of Dungarvan, Ireland many years ago. There was no real competition at all from artificial lights and the stars were marvellous and deep (the "few" pints of Guinness didn't hurt either). Me and two Irish lasses. They were singing Irish songs. A truly beautiful night of my life. -Jack
Naomi- I dug out my star chart this morning. I want to better know the constellations. If I wake up in the wee hours hopefully it will be clear out. Enjoy your own stargazing! -Jack
A lovely observation, thanks Jack. Seems like you are putting your monastic experience to good use and i look forward to hearing how it unfolds! God bless you.
Rick- Right now, it is exactly where I need to be. Thank you for coming along with me. -Jack
What a beautifully simple post, thanks!
One of my own favourites (Burton Watson translation of the Shih-ching)
Cold is the north wind,
the snow falls thick
If you are kind and love me,
take my hand and we'll go together
You are modest, you are slow,
but oh, we must hurry!
Fierce is the north wind,
the snow falls fast.
If you are kind and love me,
take my hand and we'll go home together
You are modest, you are slow,
but oh, we must hurry!
Nothing redder than the fox,
nothing blacker than the crow.
If you are kind and love me,
take my hand and we'll ride together
You are modest, you are slow,
but oh, we must hurry!
A lovely song, indeed! Thank you.
I have been thinking about the Zhuangzi quote you posted a few days ago. I have long admired the clarity, and vivid terseness of the Classical Chinese poets. Red Pine's translation of the Tao Te Ching was a revelation to me.
I am caught in para-scholarly discursive modes of expression. This is what has me stuck in thinking about the Anthropocene. The scholarly mode--the "white paper" is the mode par excellence of the Anthropocene. Something else is required of us.
I wonder if Christianity wouldn't be better expressed in a way closer to the Tao Te Ching and the Chinese poets? As I mentioned to Clara elsewhere in these comments, I am rereading Christ the Eternal Tao. This is the best example of such a way of expressing the Way that I know. I think we need more. I do. -Jack
I hope you'll forgive a para-scholarly reply.
It is a difficult one, but not unresolvable.
The reason it is resolvable is that the Laozi and Zhuangzi are not pre-scholarly texts, but the products of a period of extremely scholarly philosophical investigation and debate (although, as in Greece, it was primarily an oral tradition of scholarship). Even terse sentences in the Laozi can have a huge amount of scholarly weight behind them.
For instance, the opening of chapter 3, 'Not preferring the worthy allows people to not argue', is a direct reversal of Mozi's 'prefer the worthy', which was central to a competing and fully elaborated philosophical position. There is also some evidence that this sentence was a later addition to the chapter, which further illustrates how the text was produced from within a complex interplay of scholarly traditions.
Yet one doesn't need to know about Mozi at all to feel the line's power, both in its truth and in its reversal of 'common sense'. The scholarly rejection of scholarship itself allows the Laozi to reject the scholarly mode of expression, and that rejection has allowed it to address both 'philosophical' and 'religious' audiences for millennia.
Of course, saying that a rhetorical art is possible because Zhuangzi and Laozi did it is a bit like saying that breakthroughs in fundamental physics are possible because Einstein made them. They do, however, show a way.
In terms of Christian expression, Kierkegaard comes to mind, although he is very verbose compared to the Chinese classics! Perhaps CS Lewis and Chesterton are closer models, with their taste for paradox and ability to leave intellectual vanity at the door when writing.
I suspect, though, that you are very much closer to the Christian version of the Laozi than I am. I think of the desert fathers and the early monastic texts, especially Bernard's Steps of Humility and Pride: ''The first step of pride is curiosity'. I know this comment illustrates the depths of my own weakness in that particular regard, but so it goes.
The neglect of the monastics when teaching philosophy and the humanities in Western universities is, I think, deeply revealing. 'Here are the classics - don't worry about this millennia, nothing much happened there - ah, Descartes (or, if they are very brave, a cartoonish and inaccurate Aquinas)'.
I try to be charitable, but it feels like the choice of cowards who lack the intellectual resources to refute a fundamentally contrary position, but who dare not admit it has not been refuted. Of course, at this point, most of the professors are themselves ignorant of even the Greek and Roman classics; so it is seldom their choice.
I think you would very much like a book called 'The Gourd and the Cross' by Sung-hae Kim. She is both a Catholic nun and a professor of Chinese religion, and the book is about Daoism and Christianity. I'm not entirely sure what I've done with my copy, but I remember it being good.
And thank you for the book recommend. I will look into it further. -Jack
Thank you. For what it is worth, I don’t reject scholarship. I do have reservations about it, certainly. It is powerful within its sphere and of great usefulness for clarifying what is unclear. I thought about studying philosophy in college, but it was the scholarly mode that deterred me. I went for music instead.
Have you read What is Ancient Philosophy? Which is, of course, a work of scholarship. It is a book that very much resonated with me. What we, certainly I, lack is not access to scholarship--which has never been more accessible--but to practices and a way of life that grounds us in, dare I say it, reality. That is what interests me. That is what I am always groping towards.
Thank you for being here and for your contributions. -Jack
My Buddhist teacher often says, the only ignorance we are allowed on the path is the belief in Enlightenment. He thus resolves, in my mind, the conflict in so many aspiring practitioners’ minds - trying to reconcile the ultimate and the relative. This is in response to your comment about “the first step of pride is curiousity”. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t have to get rid of all our failings at once. There is a path and steps. What is an achievement on one step becomes an obstacle and will need to be discarded on the next, and it continues until we reach the end of the path, which, because this description is from a Buddhist path, is Enlightenment, whatever that might mean. This knowledge encourages patience, humility, perseverance etc because we don’t have to get everything right, now.
And of course, the big bombshell is, what? belief in Enlightenment is an ignorance? (in Buddhism, ignorance doesn’t have a moral value to it, it just means an obscuration, a wrong view). I’ll leave it to each individual to know what that means. I feel this letting go of what we considered an achievement at an earlier stage, involves a lot of staring into the abyss type of thing, a kind of dark night of the soul. The darkness and the abyss just gets deeper and more subtle along the way.
P. S. thanks for the Chinese poetry --
I received "Through the Eyes of a Stranger" today. Hopefully I will be starting it soon. I am still grappling with if is possible to escape the Leibowitzian dilemma.
I've been thinking about that book, both of them actually. I think that Will B doesn't believe in sin, and so his book doesn't really grapple with the full depth of what I believe about human nature. On the other hand the 'Canticle' author was ultimately overwhelmed by his own depression and so I am guessing that he may have had a darker view of us and our lives than what I believe to be full reality. Sorry, that sounds too dismissive and I don't mean it that way.
My experience of God Himself has left me with abiding hope, though I struggle to stay in that reality. It is the deepest, truest reality and the one that "feels" authentic to me. I can understand hopelessness but it doesn't feel trustworthy. It diminishes God. Maybe that is just me being naive.
Clara- I don't believe you are being naive at all. To think that the Leibowitizian dilemma can be "solved" is likely to be on the wrong track entirely (I am guilty as charged). Those that dismiss our fallenness are the one's being naive. But we can live simply. We can seek first the Kingdom of God. Consider the Ravens! As I read it, Mt. 6:24-34, Jesus is asking something quite radical from us. He is asking us to trust in God completely and not hedge our bets and trust our own powers. It seems impossible for us to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, but there it is! We can't serve God and Mammon. We must choose.
I see glimpses of it in Classical Chinese poetry and in the Tao Te Ching. I am rereading Christ the Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene and he lays out the path of the Logos/Tao. I need a deeper understand of what hope really is. It surely isn't about everything working out according to my ego desires. -Jack
My favorite sentence: "We are obscured from the cosmic situation in which we find ourselves and are befuddled. "
I have often had that same feeling when out at night in suburbia... I know there are many people here but all I hear is compressors (ac units) and all I see are the flickers in the windows. Maybe it is worse than befuddled.
Clara
Clara- The whole idea of the suburbs is a strange one. The 'burbs used to at least kind of look nice. Not so much anymore. But in either case the suburbs seem to be the pleasant architecture of loneliness. I have spent most of my life there. -Jack
Clara- You are right, it is worse than "befuddled". I amended the sentence. Thank you. -Jack