Donald and Rene. Friends for Life.

It is interesting to me to note the distinct similarities between authors who lived around 400 years apart from each other. As much as we want to believe that thought, and society have progressed in enormous ways in this amount of time, this little example serves as further proof of the fact that people are people are people are people. Our minds aren't evolving. They are still finite. Children these days are in no way capable of something more than those who lived centuries ago. We still ask the same fundamental questions, and go about answering them in relatively similar ways, no matter how much we want to think we have invented something "new" or "special," we haven't. So, sorry kids, we're just playing with the ideas that have been around since, well, the beginning of time. And now, for a little comparative reading. First Descartes (meditations), then Donald Miller (through painted deserts).

"Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last...So today I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here, quite alone, and at last I will devote myself and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions."

-and-

"I began to wonder what personal ideas I believed that weren't true. I believed I was not athletic enough; too stupid, I believed I had to go to college; I believed the Astros were a more important team than the Mets; I believed jeans that cost fifty dollars were better than jeans that cost thirty; I believed living in a certain part of town made you more important than living in another. I looked up at the cosmos and it had no scientific proof that any of this was true. The cosmos wasn't telling me I was stupid; it wasn't telling me one pair of jeans was better than another. The cosmos was just spinning around up there, as if to create beauty for beauty's sake, paying no attention to the frivolity of mankind. And I liked the cosmos. I liked the cosmos very much. It seemed that it understood something, perhaps, humanity did not understand...I confess I wanted to believe life was bigger, larger than my presuppositions. Out there under the cosmos, out in the desert of Texas, beneath those billion stars and the umbrella of pitch-black eons of nothingness, on top of that hill, I started wondering if life was something different than I thought it was, if there was some kind of raging beauty a person could find, that he could get caught up in the why of life..."

Strikingly similar, strikingly honest, strikingly self-aware.

Suddenly I am overcome by wonder about what presuppositions I hold that are not eternally significant, or full of truth--probably something that is important to wonder at some point during my life.

Too bad I don't have a large stretch of free time in which to ponder these things. Day by day I suppose.