{"id":2621,"date":"2017-09-25T11:46:22","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T19:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=2621"},"modified":"2017-09-25T11:47:30","modified_gmt":"2017-09-25T19:47:30","slug":"the-impossible-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=2621","title":{"rendered":"The Impossible Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was singing this song to myself, from the Broadway play of the 1960s, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reelclassics.com\/Actors\/O'Toole\/impossibledream-lyrics.htm\">Man of La Mancha<\/a>\u2014, revealing my private dreams of grandiosity. These betray the mind\u2019s capacity to think in terms of superlatives. Each is paradoxical, a way of dramatizing ambition, such as dreaming an impossible dream or fighting an unbeatable foe.<\/p>\n<p>They are indeed impossible\u2014but that\u2019s part of the irony\u2014some few idealists want to fulfil the total ideal, an asymptotic goal\u2014like the speed of light. Or as Paul Simon sang in a 1977 song, \u201cThe closer you get to your destination, the more you keep slip-sliding away.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the song reminded me of Don Quixote and how in my early teens I pronounced his name Don Kwix-ote instead of Don Key-hoe-tee, as I later learned that it should be pronounced. These kinds of experiences are highlighted by a sense of shame.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I like that song and sing it in the shower, and I just realized that this Dream the Impossible Dream song betrays an ambition to be the best\u2014an abstraction\u2014 rather than who I am\u2014a mixture \u2014often not the best in all ways\u2014 indeed, nowhere near the best in any of them!\u2014and mixed also with weaknesses\u2014but truly unique in the combination!<\/p>\n<p>It occurred to me that there never has been such a combination of scores of virtues and weakness-es and hundreds of things about which I\u2019ve been mediocre. But God has never been this unique combination before (and likely will never again!). There are so many variables, and individuality is a form of special-ness. So I don\u2019t have to be so heroic! Whew!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was singing this song to myself, from the Broadway play of the 1960s, Man of La Mancha\u2014, revealing my private dreams of grandiosity. These betray the mind\u2019s capacity to think in terms of superlatives. Each is paradoxical, a way of dramatizing ambition, such as dreaming an impossible dream or fighting an unbeatable foe. They [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,16,20,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-papers","category-follies","category-favoritethings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2622,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions\/2622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}