What is not up to you? Beyond your power? Not subject to your will in the last instance? For starters, let's take "your station in life." As I glide down toward that little town on my short parachute ride, I'm just about to learn how negligible is my control over my station in life. It's not at all up to me. Of course I'm going right now from being the Wing Commander, in charge of a thousand people (pilots, crewmen, maintenance men), responsible for nearly a hundred airplanes, and beneficiary of goodness knows all sorts of symbolic status and goodwill, to being an object of contempt. "Criminal," I'll be known as.
But that's not half the revelation that is the realization of your own fragility, that you can be reduced by the natural elements, or men, to a helpless, sobbing wreck—unable to control even your own bowels—in a matter of minutes. And more than that even, you're going to face fragilities you never before let yourself believe could be true.
Like after mere minutes, in a flurry of action while being knocked down and then sat up to be bound with tourniquet-tight ropes, with care, by a professional, hands cuffed behind, jack-knifed forward, head pushed down between your ankles held secure in lugs attached to a heavy iron bar, that with the onrush of anxiety, knowing your upper-body blood circulation has been stopped, and feeling the ever-growing pain and the ever-closing-in of claustrophobia as the man standing on your back gives your head one last shove down with his heel and you start to gasp and vomit, that you can be made to blurt out answers, probably correct answers, to questions about anything they know you know.
I'm not going to pull you through that explanation again. I'll just call it "taking the ropes."
—from James B. Stockdale, The Stoic Warrior's Triad
No comments:
Post a Comment