The family may well be considered, and would have to think at least, as a fundamental human institution. All admit that was the main cell and central unit of most societies that have existed until now, the exception, truth be told, in some societies as that of Lacedaemon to opt for "efficiency" and that, consequently, has died without leaving a trace. E1 Christianity, which was the great revolution brought, did not alter this sacred thing, as old and savage, he did nothing more than giving back. He did not deny the trinity of father, mother and child. Just read it backwards, making the child, mother and father. And this is no longer called the family, but Holy Family, because many things are made holy only to be turned. But some scholars of our own decay have launched a serious attack on the family. She has been attacked, and I think that the wrong way; and their advocates have defended, and have done the wrong way. The most common defense of the family is that, amid the tensions and changes of life, is a peaceful place, comfortable and united. But it is possible another defense of the family, and I think obviously, is to say that the family is not peaceful, or comfortable, or together.
The family as an institution in the modern world today
is not fashionable to sing the benefits of small community. It tells us to throw to by large empires and large ideas. There is an advantage, however, in the state, city or small town that only the willfully blind will overlooked. The man who lives in a small community lives in a world much larger. She knows a lot more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are given us. Thus in all large and highly civilized societies groups are formed, founded on what is called sympathy and silence the real world more sharply so that the doors of a monastery. The truth is that there is nothing small or limited in the clan or tribe which is really small and limited is the gang or clique. Those in a clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or because they are all descended from the same sacred cow, but in their souls, by a divine luck of things, there will be more colors than in any tartan. Those in a gang or a group live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, as there is in hell. A big society exists to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery to protect the sensitive loner and all the bitter experience and empowering human commitments. In the most literal sense of words, is a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge. We
see this change, for example, in the modern transformation of what is called the club. When London was smaller, and smaller neighborhoods and families, the club was what is still in the villages, the opposite of what is now in the big cities. It was considered then as a place where a person could be sociable. Now the club is valued as a place where one can be unsociable. The larger and made our civilization so much longer the club a place where one can have a loud argument, and it becomes a place where one can eat alone, on their own, without anyone bothering you. E1 goal is to feel comfortable, and make a man comfortable is to make the opposite of sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of hardships, dangers and sacrifices. The club tends to produce the most degrading of all combinations, the hermit of luxury, the man who combines the sensual indulgence of Lucullus with loneliness insane Simeon Stylites.
If tomorrow morning a huge snowfall will not let us out of the street you would enter suddenly live in a world much larger and more unusual than anything we have imagined. But all the efforts of the typical modern person is fleeing from the street where he lives. First invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invented the modern culture and goes to Florence. After invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuktu. He goes to the edges of the Earth fantastic. Intends to hunt tigers. Almost got to ride a camel. And in all this is still essentially fleeing from the street where he was born, and always have a handy explanation for his escape. He says he fled his street because it is boring. Lies. The truth is fleeing from his street because it is too exciting. It's exciting because it is demanding, it is demanding because it is full of life. You can visit Venice for him calm because the Venetians are nothing more than Venetians people in your street are men and women. You can stare at a Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing you need to look; if she can look at the old lady in the garden next door, the old woman is in motion. Is forced to flee, to put it shortly, too stimulating company of their peers-free human beings, evil, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton, and it shines too overwhelming. You have to calm down and settle down among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures, no doubt, are very different from him, but do not put their shape or color or customs decisive intellectual competition with their own traits. Do not try to destroy his principles and assert their own. The bizarre monsters on their street in the neighborhood exactly intended that. The camel does not contort their anatomy to form a splendid mockery because Mr. Robinson did not have a hump, but the cultured gentleman of the number 5 does exhibit a mockery when he warns that Mr Robinson does not have baseboard in your home. The vulture is not going to burst out laughing if you see a man fly, but the commander who lives at number 9 is laugh out loud that a man does not smoke. The common complaint that we have to make our neighbors is that they get into what does not concern them. Do not we really mean that do not get into what does not concern them. If our neighbors would not get into what does not concern them, suddenly they would be asked their income and quickly cease to be our neighbors. The we really mean when we demand that do not get into what does not concern them is something much deeper. We dislike them because they have so little strength and energy that might be interested in your stuff. We dislike them because they have strength and energy to also be interested in ours. What terrifies us of our neighbors is not the narrowness of his horizon, but its splendid tendency to widen. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. There are aversions to their weakness (as some claim), but his power The misanthropes believe despise humanity for his weakness, but the truth is that the hate for his strength.
Ordinary people
Of course, this withdrawal from the brutal vivacity and variety of ordinary people is perfectly forgivable and excusable as long as they do not wish to become an attitude of superiority But when it describes itself an aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority over bourgeoisie, there is no choice at that point justice inherent weakness. The trouble is the most unforgivable of all vices, but it is the most unforgivable of all virtues. Nietzsche, which is the most prominent representative of this pretentious claim of being annoying, is somewhere in his work a "very powerful description from the literary point of view of disgust and disdain which consume him to turn his gaze on ordinary people with ordinary faces, their voices ordinary, ordinary minds. As I said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we can classify it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has all the sanctity which belongs to the weak. When we feel that it can not endure the innumerable faces, voices incessant, overwhelming omnipresence which belongs to the crowd, have the sympathy or approval of anyone who has ever been sick on a boat or tired in a crowded bus. We all hated mankind when we were little human. Every human being has ever had humanity in his eyes like a suffocating fog, or in their nostrils like a suffocating odor. But when Nietzsche is the incredible lack of humor and imagination to ask us to believe that your aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to show the truth of things. And the truth is that it is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
We make our friends, we become our enemies, but God makes our next door neighbor. Hence the approach we covered all the terrors carefree nature, our neighbor is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as rain. Man is the most terrible of all beasts. So the old religions and the old language bíb6lico showed a wisdom so pervasive when they spoke, not the duties of humanity, but of duties to others. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of an election that is personal and even enjoyable. That duty may be our interest, may even be a fad or dissipation. We work in the poorest neighborhood because we are specially trained to work in that neighborhood, or because it seems to us, we can fight for the cause of international peace because we love fighting. E1 most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience may be the result of an election or a taste. We may be made in such a way that we love lunatics or specially interested we lepers. Can to love the blacks because they are black or German socialists because they're pedantic. But we love our neighbor because it is there, much more alarming reason for a much more serious. E1 neighbor is the sign of humanity which in fact gives us. And precisely because it can be an ordinary person, your neighbor is across the globe. It is a symbol because it is an accident.
There is no doubt that men flee from small rooms with land that is truly deadly. But this is natural because they are fleeing from death, are fleeing from life. And this applies to each of the rings of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable for men to seek some particular variety of the human type, always looking for the variety of human kind and not merely the human variety. It is perfectly logical that a British diplomat company seeks Japanese generals, if what you are general Japanese But if you just want people different from himself, he had much better stay at home and discuss religion with the maid. It is very reasonable for the genius of the people will conquer London if he wants to conquer London. But if you just want to win something important and symbolically hostile and also very strong, he had much better stay where you are and have a fight with the pastor of the church. E1 man in the street of the neighborhood behaves well if you seen Ramsgate Ramsgate-something very difficult to imagine. But if, as he puts it, going to Ramsgate "to change" then you have to tell would experience a much more romantic, even melodramatic if he jumped over the wall into the garden of his neighbor. The consequences would be invigorating on a meaning that goes far beyond the scope of hygiene in Ramsgate.
Divergences and varieties, however, the same way that this principle applies to the rule for the nation within the empire, to the city in the nation, for the street within the city, also holds for house in the street. The institution of the family should be praised for precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation or the institution of the city are praised in this respect. It's good for a man living in a family for the same reason it is good for a man to be besieged in a city. It's good for a man living in a family in the same sense that something beautiful and delicious for a man to be blocked by snow in the street. All these things you are forced to realize that life is not something that comes from outside, but something that comes from within. Above all, they all insist on the fact that life, if life is truly a stimulating and fascinating, something that by its very nature exists in spite of us. Modern writers have suggested, more or less open, that the family is a bad institution, have generally been confined to suggest, with much bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very conciliatory. But, no doubt, the family is a good institution because it is not conciliatory. Is good and healthy precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as sentimental people, a small kingdom and, like many small realms, are generally in a state that is closer to anarchy. It is precisely the fact that our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the "Trocadero Restaurant ', which gives the family
some of the invigorating qualities of the republic. It is precisely the fact that my uncle does not approve Fernando theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that makes the family is like humanity. Men and women who, for reasons good or bad, they rebel against the family are, for reasons good or bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. The grandfather is stupid, like the world, and is old, as the world.
There is no doubt that those who wish rightly or wrongly, to escape from all this, they want to get into a narrower world. The grandeur and variety of the family are left dismayed and terrified. Sara wants to find a world that consists entirely of theaters, Jorge wants to think that the 'Trocadero' is a cosmos. I'm not saying for one moment that the flight to this limited life is not right for the individual, nor say the flight into a monastery. But it is all bad and artificial which tends to make these strange people succumb to the illusion that they are entering a world that is larger and more varied than his own. The best way a human would evaluate his readiness to meet the variety commons would be dropped down the chimney of any house chosen at random, and be as good as possible with people inside. And that's essentially what each of us made the day he was born.
In this romantic adventure is truly special and sublime, of the family. It's romantic because it is "heads or tails', because that's all what his enemies say about it, because it is arbitrary, because it's there. To the extent that a group of people has been chosen rationally there will be some special or sectarian atmosphere. When choosing an irrational way then you meet more men and women without. The element of adventure begins There, for an adventure is something that naturally comes to us. It's something that chooses us, not something that we choose. E1 Falling in love is often regarded as the supreme adventure, the ultimate romantic incident. To the extent that it is something outside of us, something like a sort of cheerful fatalism, this is very true. There is no doubt that love catches us, transforms us and torture us. Really breaks our hearts with unbearable beauty, as the unbearable beauty of music. However, the extent to which, of course, have something to do with it, to the extent that somehow we are ready to fall in love and in some sense to throw to love, to the extent that to some extent choose and to some extent judge, in this sense, the fact is not truly romantic love is not really a great adventure. In this sense, the supreme adventure is not love. The supreme adventure is being born. Here we are suddenly in a splendid and startling trap. There really see something we've never dreamed of before. Our father and mother are watching, waiting, and jump on us like bandits behind a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is like a bolt from the blue sky. Upon entering the family on the birth we really in a world incalculable in a world that has its own laws and strange, in a world that could very well continue on without us, in a world that we have not made us. In other words, when we entered the family entered a fairy tale.
The adventure of the unexpected
This colorful, like a fantastic story, you should stick to the family and our relationships with them throughout life. Love is the deepest thing in life deeper than reality. For even if the reality would be misled, yet could not prove that it is insignificant or unimportant. If the facts were false, would still be very strange. And this character strange life, this element of the unexpected and even perverse things as they happen, remains incurably interesting. The circumstances that we can be gentle regular or pessimistic, but the "circumstances over which we have no control" remain tinged with something divine for those who, like Mr. Micawber, may be relied upon and renew their strength. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature, why are read more novels than scientific or metaphysical books. The reason is simple: is that the novel is more real than those other books. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a scientific book. Life may sometimes appear and much more legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song may no longer be even a beautiful lament. Maybe our existence is not intelligible justice or even a recognizable mistake. But our existence is, despite all that, a story. In the fierce alphabet sunset all is written, "continue into the next." If we have enough intelligence, we can complete and accurate philosophical deduction, and be sure that we are running correctly. With proper brain power could carry out any scientific discovery and be sure that what we had just successfully.
But even with the greatest of intelligence could finish the story easier or the dumbest, and remain confident that we have completed successfully occurs because a story has been behind not only the intelligence that is partly mechanical but the will, which in essence is divine. E1 narration writer can send his hero into the dungeon in the penultimate chapter, if desired. You can do the same divine caprice whereby the author can go to jail and then hell, if he chooses. And the same civilization, that civilization European chivalry reaffirmed freedom in the thirteenth century, produced what we call "fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, created all the bad novels are in the circulating libraries.
But that life is for us a story or a love story, it is necessary that a large part of it is decided without our permission. If our life is a system that can be a nuisance, but if we want a drama, is essential. Can often occur, no doubt, that a drama is written by someone who is not quite to our liking. But even less than we would like the author stood before the curtain every hour or so and will download all the worry about us to invent our own the next act. The human being has control over many things in his life, has control over a sufficient number of things to be the hero of a novel. But if I had control over everything, there would be both hero who would not novel. And the reason that the lives of the rich are at the bottom so dull and boring is simply because they can choose the events. Get bored because they are omnipotent. You can not have affairs because the manufacture to your specifications. What keeps life as a romantic and full of burning possibilities is the existence of these major limitations that force us all to deal with things we like and do not expect. In vain the proud speak modern living in uncomfortable environments. Being stuck in an adventure is to be put in uncomfortable environments. Being born on this earth is being born in an uncomfortable environment, and therefore, being born into an adventure. Of all these great constraints and structures that shape and create the poetry and the variety of life, the family is the most definitive and most important. Hence, it is misunderstood by modern adventure imagine that there could be more perfect degree in a complete state of what they call freedom. They think that if a man makes a gesture would be somewhat surprising and amazing that the sun fell from the sky. But what is surprising and amazing, the romantic adventure of the same Sun's existence, is that it does not fall from the sky. Looking for these people under any form and shape a world where there are no limitations, that is, a world where there are no boundaries, that is, a world where there are no figures. There is nothing more despicable and vile that many. They say they want to be as strong as the universe, but what they really want is that the entire universe is as weak as themselves.
