Laura Riding - The Why of the WindRead the full poem at the end of the post. Another poem of Riding's I really like. I am slowly making my way through a book of her poems. The poem is concerned with an ethics of self-restraint- one that reminds me more of the Buddhists than the Stoics. We must learn better What we are not. We are not the wind. We are not every vagrant mood that tempts Our minds to giddy homelessness. We must learn to distinguish better Between ourselves and strangers. The Buddha said that we have no "self" as we know it - that our thoughts, feelings and preferences are just hallucinations of the ego. The real self is the clarity that comes when the mind reaches a silence. Thus we should learn not to take our windiest thoughts too seriously, to to chase after them, as this often leads us into bad places. In theory I should dislike didactic art or those that spouse ethics, but also, that is the contemporary critic voice talking. When I trust the writer and they phrase…
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