“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life — they have never felt its breath, its heart — however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material which needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my theories about it.” Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago
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I must confess that I’m somewhat confused by Pasternak’s distinction between “reshaping life” and the “renewal of life.” I don’t question, of course, that life is constantly renewing itself. By the same token, there’s something to be said for being pro-active on certain occasions, rather than always remaining reactive. Are there not places in which we need to take action, make changes, try new things, etc.—in order to infuse our lives with something that is missing. Perhaps I’m missing something here, but creatively reshaping one’s life at certain points does not seem to be mutually exclusive with the grateful acceptance of the evolutionary renewal that occurs through the simple unfolding of daily experience.
Yes, I’m glad this quote has provoked a discussion, George. I think Pasternak is drawing a distinction here between thinking we can go against the flow of life, arrogantly and futilely trying to mould it to our own design, ignoring the pulse and the natural rhythm of life; and allowing life (and ourselves) to renew itself (and ourselves) naturally and organically, without disturbing the innate and inevitable ‘right’ course of life with our overweening theories and intellects. Life is greater than all of us. It’s back to Robinson Jeffers, I guess.