Spot of Leunig on a Saturday Afternoon

Must say, absolutely loved this piece from Leunig courtesy of today's Saturday Age... "Is journey neccessary?"

"...If we are inclined to the view that life itself is a journey, the question of its necessity is also worth answering. If the answer is no, life is not necessary, we can then see beyond its apparent urgency and regard it as a mysterious stroke of amazing good fortune, or amazing grace... a liberating vision that can make it more beautiful and poignantly funny, as well as more bearable when... the owl of despair hoots in the night crying, "What's the point, what's the point?

I recently shared a dinner table with a man who had grown up by the Mediterranean Sea, and we discussed life's bearable and unbearable nature at some length.

"In the town I come from," he said, "when people meet each other in the street, they begin with, 'Shit, what's the point?' Right at the start, they go to the heart of things, and this allows real conversation to happen."

It seemed like a lovely, earthy social convention to me, and a very practical idea, but I know it's not likely to catch on in Australia. And I don't know how a man with a background like that was allowed to immigrate to our shores, where sunny, positive thinking is compulsory and negative capability is regarded as a brain disorder...