The pheasant of the marshes has to take ten steps
to pick up a mouthful of food,
and thirty steps
to get a drink,
but it does not seek to be nourished in a coup.

Though its spirit would (there) enjoy a royal abundance,
it does not think (such confinement) good.

Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou, trans. by James Legge, The Mastery of Life

The majority of humanity would choose to live in a cage if choice were possible. The more richly appointed the cage, the better. Better to derive one’s living from “the system”, – near aristocratic lifestyle of American suburbia, than to be the dispossessed of the world…

Which would you prefer, life in Batavia, in Geneva, or St. Charles or prefer life in Pilsen, or in the Little Village neighborhoods in Chicago? ICE is not rampaging in my town…

Is the manner of life which I presently follow, a coup of sorts? Is cage-life one that I prefer? The question is a good one that is difficult to answer with finality. I believe you have to have a sense of both sides of the line, if you dare to think about it.

Is it as if anyone exercises “choice”…?

---

A friend gave me an article about Lou Salome, a European female intellectual who prized her freedom more than the conventions of her time. She refused marriage proposals from Friedrich Nietzsche, and Paul Ree, two men who recognized her intellect as “one of a kind.”

She grew up in a privileged household in St. Petersburg, but left home at 19, a single woman traveling unattended to Rome. In Rome she met Nietzsche and Ree. She told them that she wanted an intellectual relationship, the freedom to learn, and to become herself. In 1887 she married Friedrich Carl Andreas a scholar of oriental languages, to gain social respectability, which she called a “white marriage.” In 1897 at age 36 Lou met a 21 year old poet named Ranier Maria Rilke. An affair began that lasted for years. In 1912 at age 51 she began training with Freud as a psychoanalyst. She treated patients and published essays on religion, love and psychoanalysis.

Lou Andreas-Salome died in 1937 at age 76, still working, writing, refusing to be diminished by age or convention.