While I consider my grandmother to be a wise woman, sometimes I am honestly puzzled by what she is going on about! Logically speaking, and I believe that she is capable of this style of thinking, the issue we were dealing with probably does not need all the attention it got, attention that could easily be devoted to, for instance reading.
(Here I propose a further question: What makes reading superior to debating invitation procedures? I mention reading for the sole reason that that was what my grandma interrupted. Yes, definitely it does enrich your experience here on earth in one way or another, as does learning new things, listening to music, meeting new people… But if we were to rack our brains about whether every activity we do makes our life more fulfilling we would be wasting it away. So should we just stop trying in general? But enough questions. After all, I must continue this highly intellectual endeavor and move onto the definition and applications of customs, rituals, and other social phenomena that I am definitely qualified to talk about.)
My grandma is the person with the best eyesight in my family, yet I am positive that she always carries a pair of filtering-reality-through-social-convention glasses with her. So what about those conventions or customs? The general consensus is that customs are something you usually do - thank you Cambridge for these words! Knowing very well that the ways of savoir-vivre are entirely made up and not binding, why do we still ascribe so much importance to them?
I do not care to attempt answering the purpose-of-life question, but I do think that our disorientation about it leads us to pay so much attention to such little things. Why would we choose running around confused, looking for meanings of meanings of meanings, when we could just make up a rule to obey, complicate it on 20 levels and add 14 clauses to it, and boom - we are kept occupied!
But is it all so drab after all? Thanks to the multitude of opinions, philosophical theories and scientific facts, I do not have to spread any more negativity- anthropology can come to the rescue. The ritualistic nature of our behavior, when looked at from an anthropological point of view, seems strangely beautiful. The longing to feel connection with other people and be part of a community is one reason to follow the slightly bizarre patterns. Is it not an exciting and hope-inducing view -
“No. No. Wrong. Don’t You remember?”
I shake from my philosopher-thinker pose, look up and … Sartre’s eyes are staring at me through his thick glasses and veil of equally thick pipe smoke.
“What the …”
“What? I spend all my life thinking and you want to take my spot? I spend time and energy on writing that damn ‘Nausea’ book you are apparently ‘so in love with’ and I get a ‘what’? All the time I spent on writing the made-up historical facts about some marquis to show how people go crazy over details not relevant to their lives because hyper fixation gives them supposed sanity in an absurd life on earth, and you still want to make the crazy and pathetic human beings seem ‘beautiful’?”
I try to apologize but before I open my mouth, the smoke, the glasses, and then the man himself disappear**, and I am sitting alone on the balcony feeling the light breeze coming from the sea and the smell of coffee my grandma just made. I sit a while longer, then decide to get up – after all I must get myself ready for the evening’s outing.
