Where dreams end and illusions begin…

Two weeks before I leave for Holland. Kind of an odd standstill yet rapid time. Not much to write but I feel compelled to. I finally finished a book I've been reading for a while, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo – Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin. It actually had some fantastic stuff about how we deceive ourselves; create these ideal images and extravagant expectations. We've fallen in love with the image of the world and our lives rather than what it really is. Yet that is what it is now. An image. This is something I easily do when I think of going abroad, and I should keep it in mind this time as well. I wonder if it would make a difference?

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or to imagine…We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the World which we may hate or think we hate.To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions. Notions of which neither we nor the Communists have ever dreamed and which we can never see in our mirror. One of our grand illusions is the belief in a "cure." There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning.

…We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.