The Knee of Listening – Chapter 4

 


THE KNEE OF LISTENING

The Life and Understanding

of

Franklin Jones

Copyright 1971 By Franklin Jones

All rights reserved


 

Chapter 4: The Seeker

There exists a dismal photograph of me with my parents, taken on the day of my graduation from college. The day of college graduation is generally supposed to be a day of celebration. All your relatives are supposed to congratulate you with various gifts. You are supposed to be very relieved of the long effort of preparatory study and testing. In your revelry of accomplishment, you are to look forward ideally to productive life’s work the beginning of some professional study that will expand your maturity in useful learning, teaching or service. But I had nowhere to go. Who in the world could teach me this thing I had to learn? Where in the world was it being lived? How at all could I accomplish what I sought?

I saw that in fact I had attained to nothing at all. I was proficient in no science or art, interested in perfecting no existing form of knowledge or productivity. I had been honored in nothing. I had failed to grasp even the one thing I had touched that seemed to make the difference. I had no impulse of any kind to succeed or even to make a living. I felt an overwhelming sense of failure. I had already lost very heavily in love. I had the sympathy of no one.

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