Ambition to die

Just a coincidence, I guess, but I'm reading a novel* where I come across this passage:

'There are no youthful illusions in such a place. You do not mistake the world's character. By the age of seven we were all as cynical as abbots.'

Together they agree that the losing of illusions is an indispensable preparation for those who hope to rise in the world. On a third bottle, they confide to each other that they are ambitions, madly ambitious and that through luck and hard work they intend to  die famous men. 

What kind of ambition - unless mad, in the most negative sense of the word - is it to achieve whatever and DIE?  In my book, just as in The Book, to be ambitious is to achieve LIFE.

*Pure by Andrew Miller. Allegedly the winner of the 2011 Costa Novel Award, but so far (page 49) boring and disappointing. And starts with a ridiculous, unless sarcastic, quote from de Condorcet: The time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who have no master but their reason.

(Good luck!)

Vanity

By Harmen van Steenwyck (the National Gallery, London)

Footsteps on the stairs below alerted the playful boy* in me. I crouched by the door in the hallway in wait for my 40-something-year-old brother. In the few seconds  it took him to reach the first floor, I was making up my mind whether this time I would be the neighbour's dog** or a mad dwarf vampire. His hand reached for the handle, the door opened and I... well, I was just about to give out a mad bark (I can't remember what I eventually decided to be; I guess a dwarf vampire could also bark madly?) when my brother, who must have somehow caught a movement of my shadow when I was readjusting my position for the upcoming semi-leap, said in a frustratingly relaxed, matter-of-fact voice: 'All in vain.'


When I was getting up, I realised this flop had been predicted quite a way back, so I walked away murmuring: '... Vanity. All is vanity. What profit has a man of all his labour which he takes under the sun?'








*I realised the other day, that your spirituality is in many, perhaps even in the most crucial, respects proportionate to the degree to which you've cultivated, or re-awoken, the happy,
playful boy (girl) in you.

** you don't want to know it.

Be-sinned by Devil

'A city bedevilled by sin', said the priest in his sermon, referring to Nineveh.


Shouldn't it be 'A city be-sinned by the Devil'? I wondered.