+1

To seek yourself is to hold yourself, to bridge the madness of the world to your oftentimes incommensurable needs; to resign yourself is to put yourself at the mercy of something higher, to engage freedom with smiling eyes. The incomparable offer of religion.

What Damien Rice Inspires

A foreign poet's twisted smile, uncanny,
Sleeping love once lost, bleeding now
The sadness of its past, lost, regained
With nine-tenths kindess quenched
By the fire of incandescent smiles.
Life's a rambling dream, sweet dreamers,
Poor are those whose time is up,
And fall again to this false-real world.
But then again a bitter side lingers,
Corrupts, destroys, sweetens the bright,
Haggles the shimmering endless stream
Of time, time, time, inexorable tonight.

And Again

“My friends, what is happiness?” – thus I asked this diverse little crowd, and each man poured his own heart in words:

Happiness is getting what you want when you want it.

Happiness is getting away from yourself – transcending yourself.

Happiness is being yourself, continually striving for and sustaining yourself.

Happiness is nothing more than pleasure – the negation of pain.

Happiness is being with that particular person who you can grow old with – love, really, erotic love.

Happiness – no, it’s more along the agapas the Greeks understood: universal love for men.

Happiness – no, no, it’s nothing more than doing God’s will.

Happiness is the feeling of power, of overcoming, of movement towards perfection. And God does not exist.

I felt myself involuntarily walk up that spectrum of tenseness, each gradation according to each infinitely different answer, from the fat man with generalizations, from the skinny man with particularizations, some with pride dancing in their eyes, others with a eyes whose darkness was a razor to my own, for I had dared to ask that question that no man who has fallen from the clouds of euphoria would dare ask: what is happiness? Apparently there was no answer, and we all didn’t have it. So it went. But as that settling malaise wrapped its wretched wings around this congregation of philosophers – common men with uncommon curiosities – like a constellation around me, I felt my mind quicken under the whiplash of intuition: someone was missing. No – yes – yes, there surely was a shadow sitting where a man once dwelt, and so –- I looked around to find him: nothing. I stood up, resigned my seat, and decided to take a brief walk outside, to catch the fresh air. The coolness of the air greeted me, the sun burned my eyes, and –-

There he was: slightly slouched against a lawn chair, middle-aged with shy streaks of gray appearing here and there in faint places on his head, on the border of the concrete of my back porch which edged the fresh grass now kissed by the dying wind. The look on his face –- serene; the distance of his eyes –- infinite. He was evidently looking at everything, therefore nothing at all, possessed by some strange absorption, as if Aphrodite had danced calmly before his eyes. I wasted no time:

“My dear friend,” my voice clearly a sin against the sanctity of the moment, “what is happiness?”

Silence, and then: “Happiness?” He turned my way to admit my existence, with a warm look in his eyes.

“Yes, happiness,” I paused, in slight confusion at the perplexity that subtly revealed itself in his brow, “there are a million different men in there who have a million different answers, and if life isn’t a road whose end is happiness, I see no reason to live.”

“Happiness,” he spoke again, a half-sigh, half-reproach, not quite in response, but as if speaking parallel with my own voice, then he quickened up; his eyes finally drifted away from his previous target; he focused on my face, and –- the oddness! -– smiled, and so childishly! “Happiness,” for the third time, still with the exact same lethargic emphasis, as if it was merely a grain of sand among hundreds that he was letting fall through his fingers, “that, my friend, is a word that means nothing at all.”

An incomparably angelic look poured from the unity of his features as he again looked out, again lost focus, again swam in his own thoughts, as they swam with the immaculate wonder that nature had brought before us; and I – I rubbed my eyes, like a man in the dark spontaneously flashed with light, ruffled my hair, felt that preternatural stranglehold whose hands I knew not bid me adieu, and left him alone, with a devilish thought to start the house on fire and save the poor men inside from a life of revolting futility.

Existential Thoughtlessness

Good clothes; good car; good friends; regardless, smile; regardless, tradition; regardless, resentment; regardless, away from solitude; essentially it is this: look outward! Your salvation lies without! You are truly thus a human being; you are truly thus unhappy. You are a slave to others; you have no conception of yourself outside of the eyes of others. Your eyes are not even your own. You are all each other's puppets, and there are no puppeteers. Our age is a massive starvation of souls: we need introversion! We have no understanding of ourselves, and such is impossible so long as we are looking out for the approvement of others.

We are all each other's puppets, and there are no puppeteers -- yes! And how simply one can observe this. The girl who laughs a certain way, or who talks with a certain accent, the man who walks with a certain pomp, seeming to imply that he is indestructible to outward pressure -- when in fact it might be the complete opposite, and he may fear everyone and everything; and why? Because those he does it for may easily unveil what hides beneath his false, projected self -- nothing at all. We are all each other's puppets -- that is, we all control the actions and opinions of others; and there are no puppeteers -- for there is no one who consciously controls anything. A reaction that precipitates another reaction, this reaction causing another, and so on ad infinitum -- such is our state today. But not all are victims; those who aren't are out. Blessed are those who are out!

What is implied in the psyche of the individual who adheres to the drowning pool ideal of materialism? Look at me! It does not even have to be material one raves over, that one attempts to ravish the admiration of others over; it can be a part of your character! You act a certain way to garner the attention of others -- you are a psychological materialist, this is perhaps worse: you sell your self by making it inauthentic, placing it on a rack for the sake of others. Still it lies: look at me! We must ask why. All desire for attention implies a discontentment with what attention one already has; all desire implies discontentment. The person who wants attention wants to be seen; and being seen is the essence of love. You want to be loved, thus you are not loved sufficiently, you do not love sufficiently. The two cannot be dichotomized. You are by all appearances happy, by all social conventional perceptions you have what is needed, by all political and psychological standards you are sufficient -- but you still want more. Thus you are not complete. You cannot lie to yourself, no matter how dazzlingly the outside world lies for you, with shining eyes. The spirit of ostentation needs to be cut off and uprooted; one needs to resign oneself, to God if at all possible, and learn that the monomanic desire for satiation only catalyzes the disease each and every moment the process continues. You are attaching yourself to the world around you; thus you cannot know God, cannot know beauty, cannot know love. All things that would be good for you in themselves become distorted through this gnawing concern for what others think -- down to the very music you listen to. You cannot appreciate it; you can only appreciate the ghost of social opinion. Thus you are not far from insanity, you who fosters illusion.

You have money; this transforms into possessions you flutter before the world -- look at me!
You have intelligence; this transforms into pedantry, didactic behavior -- look at me!
You have wit, humor; you are the warm center that the world crowds around -- look at me!
You are attractive -- nothing even needs be said.

And the tragi-comedy perpetuates itself for the simple reason that most everyone is involved with it, which isn't to say that few people know what everyone else is doing. They do, and this mutual knowledge between decadents is what causes personal wars when the smell of authenticity rears its head to the equally inauthentic individual in the foreground, waiting with impatience and resentment for his turn at attention as another steals his thunder. But the truly feared are those who know, to the quick, what is going on, and still themselves refuse to join themselves in the same bonfire of depravity that everyone else is involved in. These are the knights of power, who stand above the opinions of others, and see the universe without obstruction. This, and this alone, is the single greatest advantage that religion has brought into the world: a purity of vision, a detachment from the world, thus an ability to enjoy it, and love those within it. And how sad that religion is exploited for social relations, that one might be noticed by others! Religion is used as a way to keep oneself in the warm waters of orthodoxy, that one may not be considered heretical by those whose attention one seeks to gain. And again, again, again, whoever does this, engages in this hypocritcal act, doesn't believe in anything. All is for show, nothing is held from true conviction, and thus the holy has become fragmented from impurity.

Do not look out, but look within. See the task you are called to do, and do it, and the result of single-heartedly willing this one thing, constantly changing in accordance to your situation in life, will bring you authentic happiness. The world is so busy, so incessantly busy, with tasks involved in it, absorbing what little stimulation it offers, that it is clear that what they are doing doesn't make them deeply, truly happy -- because, almost certainly, it isn't who they are; they are swallowing the faulty advice of those who presume to know them better than they know themselves. People, as Kierkegaard once said, seek pleasure so hard that they often run right by it; so it is here. Nobody knows what happiness is; yet everyone thinks he has it before his nose.

Materialism

But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. -- Luke 6:24 (NASB)

With the materialist one's self is the limitation of one's possessions unperceived by the eye under the inexorable disease of corruption. With materialism what one owns is a signifier -- not for his happiness, as the promise initially held, but for his self -- his possessions signify what will soon be his self crumbling away. What is materialism? Dependence on facticity. The solidity of the conclusion speaks: the other is needed, and only the other can save -- an eternal "you" over the temporal "it". For the nasty trick of materialism is the eternalization process inherent to consciousness: what exists objectively is embalmed by the mind through idealization, and it cannot be otherwise -- this is simply how the mind works. The necessary dichotomy of temporality and eternity is where the sting lies: the mind works through idealization, eternity; the objectivity that the mind feeds on works through becoming. Thus the infinite shocks that piledrive us when what is idealized must constantly be changed to fit the implacable demands of becoming.

Therefore, every thing must be resigned; and this is not possible in itself, lest despair results, but through the transcendence of another -- blessed are the others, for they are the life-rafts that keep us from drowning in the waters of despair. This other can be human or divine. The human is a synthesis of the temporal and eternal; therefore it takes cleverness to know how to extract eternality while leaving temporality in the ditch. The Zeitgeist these days revolves around the superficiality of appearance as criteria for acceptance (whereas in the past it was intelligence, creativity, courage, etc.); appearance implies facticity; facticity implies becoming; thus the process murders itself. Her looks -- they are here a moment and gone forever. They can be enjoyed, but only with a mind that knows the subtleties of ephemerality -- for the good looks are easily idealized, and therein lies the poison. To see the eternity in a person is to see him as a unity; it is to see beyond the particulars and the idealization they regress into to a center whose circumference is -- nowhere. This process of unification simultaneously makes transparent; one sees through the particulars that make up a person to a self that is the sole remainder of the melted remains of temporality at its feet, and it is this firm standing, this self without blemish at the end of the deal, that proves its eternity, its infinite hardness. This realization of self through unity is called love. Hatred is simply the focus on a particular -- almost always a particular as it relates to the past. To see a person you hate is a contradiction; at best one only sees the shell of oneself.

The human, then, has the danger of temporality; therefore the quintessential solution to materialism is: divinity. Eternity without the temptations of temporality. The problem is solved -- so long as you grow a will and accept your sufferings.

+1

Blessed are the depressed, for they are the muffled remainders of our dreams of a shimmering foreign world.

Preconceptions

Preconception really and truly is nothing less than this: murder. Don't do it; you have the seedlings of the antichrist if you do, and I'm only half-joking. If you label, you limit; if you limit, you negate the ever-changing -- enter the human being. How can you love a person if you limit him to -- yourself? What more is preconception as it relates to those killed by it than a corruptive form of self-relation? It's the stagnant remainder of selflessness dropping off: with preconceptions one is the ugliest egotist: one insists on creating one's own reality; one thereby becomes the enemy of all relational truth. It is weakness incarnated: cowardice essentially, for what easier way to put an end to this individual who is different than you than to label him heretic and move on, breathing your own contaminated air? Yes, yes, you are ahead of me: the church is notorious for shutting itself in on itself, leaving to the cold (in reality, the warmth: everything outside of corruption is warmth) those "blasphemers" who disagree, usually on the pivot-point of jot or tittle. Ah, well, the institution is born, mummifies everything potentially marvelous, and dies -- and continues dying, until the bodies within it, that preach on its behalf, externally by all means apparently alive -- then one looks closer! -- are no more, which is...ah, don't hope for the microscopic.

Give me religion, politics, an infinite array of values -- praised from the eternal past unto the eternal future as shimmering mediums of progress; but if anywhere this involves preconceptions, you must die -- he who lives by the spiritual sword must die by it. You must die -- and I will not save you from your death, so long as insistence boils in your blood. I will not bring before you the most decadent form of religious superficiality, with its "grace" -- its cheap grace -- and pretend (the adherants to cheap grace do have magnificent imaginations!) you are righteous when in reality, through preconception, you are revolting -- no, I will consent to your death, soft-hearted, melancholic, for you have reached even where forgiveness is powerless -- and you will live again! -- If not for the first time!

A heart without obstruction loves -- inexorably, inevitably, involuntarily loves, and loves infinitely, that is, with infinite freedom; and there is no greater antagonist to love than the demon we have before us. It takes a will to love, for the heart is always under the pressure of those invisible monsters that continually seek to stifle it with hatred -- and how is hatred sustained except through its right hand man, the conceptualization of the human being? -- and needs a way to push off such beasts. It takes will -- and will implies pain; thus let us go to war for clear perception, for love -- to war! Noble is the man whose treasure is his own two spiritual eyes.

Criminal

Like a man who is compelled under water by some strange amorphous and invisible force, forced to hold his breath and swim according to a course he does not see any true relevance in doing, to the point of almost drowing, and then: granted that quick little gasp of breath to keep the process running, he emerges at the surface, with the chilling fingers of ephermerality gliding down his spine, takes his air, always only enough to keep him alive minimally, and irrevocably minimally, and down again, again – to the depths, to follow once more that useless path, that seeming self-inflicted psychological masochism, that destruction of all potential for curiosity and the particularity that works with it, and then, at the end of the deal, to be reproached by those within the same generation for being uncreative, without style, passion, anything that signifies life – that is every man under the constraints of education; and only the geniuses – those who see the world in a fundamentally different light – are conscious of themselves continually drowning – the rest have never yet lived –, are conscious of the fact that it takes open air, even if the air is contaminated with antagonism, to actualize themselves through their expression, through their striving for themselves, are thus capable of juggling the essential with the instrumental – for, after all, education is instrumental. All are forced under the pedestrian imbecility of education; better to call it a form of execution for those who are constantly being annihilated under its reign, better still to call it an embalming process for the stillborn. As soon as education was enlisted by the spirit of gravity, it died as a means to foster uniqueness. Proof: as soon as you resign yourself from the common route of overwhelming yourself with studies, you are cursed, treated as a pestilence, condemned as idle, unambitious; even more incredulity is heaped on those who drop the studies of school for the life-instilling experiences of men who also were impervious to the corruption of systematic digestion. The student finishes his studies, and like a dog shakes himself clean of the muck he has raked in – and like a dog he never becomes clean –, finds himself plunged into the world, almost certainly involved in something he comes to find as distasteful – it takes inwardness, particularity, to know what you want to do – and so the conclusion rolls down: he dries up under his despair, follows what gives him money, takes up sports, hunting, other useless nihilistic chores, she tacks on friends like they were magnets, both become attached, enchanted by the black magic of consumerism, and so death has a hiding place. Education has given man the world in exchange for a soul by which to absorb it; what was meant to be a walking stick that aided the wanderer where his heart begged him has now become his heart, therefore he is heartless, aimless, lost, dead. How hard it is to keep one’s uniqueness in this world! It takes either religion or obstinance – and all religion is a type of obstinance, but religion is in eclipse. Marriage? Yes, marriage is a momentary salvation; but soon the lovers who depend on each other with such unbridled aesthetic passion suck up those unified qualities that make each other attractive. We have nowhere to reside except ourselves, but such land is against our super-sensitive tastes, for it involves pain. Whither shall we go? We are bound to die by repetition.

Folk Proto-Existentialism

Reading Nietzsche while listening to Dylan -- is there any higher blessed spiritual hedonism?

Yes

"A man loses his umbrella, and he searches desperately for it all day, but he loses himself -- and does not even notice." -- Kierkegaard

Happiness, Striving

A man who refuses to swim in the deep waters of the beach and thus garner all the beauty and wonder involved at the sacrifice of his immobility, his painless simplicity, for an infinitely higher happiness, but would rather admire only faintly from afar, walking on the shoreline, what his lucidity affords him, what fate has dropped at his doorstep, what serves his senses without a tinge of authentic self-assertion -- that is the man of today, of yesterday, in perpetuity. Let us weep for him; are you weeping for yourself?

Aha, this is interesting: the etymology of the word happiness carries with it the connotation of luck, from the root word hap, "chance, fortune"; happiness is luckiness. Thus the man who looks down the precipice of his own nonbeing needs something grander than happiness, for happiness technically understood has no legs in which to actualize itself, to bring itself into being. Indeed, happiness so understood implies patience, and verily the noble man is patient, but the fortune that he waits for is a whore. The idea of happiness so understood is so secondary, so inferior to not even an ideal world, but a good one, that it is the definitive argument against God if it is the only conception that fits this universe. To wait for happiness! As laughable as it is repugnant; as contemptuous as it is horrifying. Give me sin, the possibility for unhappiness as a result of my misuse of freedom, give me anything -- so long as it isn't happiness as constrained by necessity. And it is infinitely true, as Camus says, that there is no love of life without despair of life; but life ruled solely by that which is beyond my control -- this life is a mockery of decency. So long as it is possible not to be as unhappy as one could be, happiness exists. Relativity is all I ask for.

Poem

Bitterness is not your bliss,
But shallow hearted decadence –
My love, you’ve lost your mind:
My tears are not your kind.
Thus this foreign tree stands
Against the coldness of biting hands,
And thus I walk, soaked with sadness,
Through this hell – pure brutal madness,
Alone, alone, alone, with one:
The thought of your heart gone, now won
By other eyes.
I sigh goodbye.

Salvation

It never ceases to amaze me! The devil perhaps exists for no other reason than that it is inconceivable that man, in spite of his depravity, in spite his finitude, could so insanely botch the idea of salvation by himself. Even the nearness of a concentration camp can be blurred out by eyes that are so intent on looking to the distant; so it is with our miserable conceptions of salvation as they relate to the present. Man has forgotten how to breathe, and in its place is repression that gains magnitude at every moment the contrast between the here and the glorious future city of oxygen called Heaven is brought before his eyes in times when he needs it most -- that is, in the present. No, salvation is now, or God is a fiction or an imbecile! And if you think the latter, would it not be pragmatically safe to conclude that He doesn't exist? And when you conclude this, would you not be better off than the man who believes that salvation is limited exclusively to the post-mortem in actually finding a meaning for yourself, a truth whose image you are stamped on, that you can thus find at least a limited happiness?

Bad Humor

Through fear of ridicule, we conceal our imperfections with humor, and thus have the eternal curse of never being found out, never being corrected, never being perfect. A sense of humor thus makes everything funny, and in proportion to its continual attempt makes the self of the humorist that much more tragic.

Greatness

The crowd can measure greatness only in proportion to its capacity to comprehend the greatness emitted by the great individual; thus if one has unparalleled greatness, to the point of surpassing the crowd's comprehension, there is only the possibility for faith in his greatness, hence unverified greatness, hence -- not greatness at all; he no longer is great, but -- foreign. Thus is the formula on which greatness rests: esse est percipi. One can only rely on oneself, and unless you are a genius at denial, you will hate yourself if you hold greatness to be the idealic waters in which to swim; one cannot convince himself of his worth except through a little reinforcement at the hands of others. But the others have relation to even more others; the opinion of subset 1 necessarily differs in opinion with the innumerable other subsets. Therefore what truly is greatness in relation to the crowd? What is greatness at all? A will to power supported by imaginary stilts. If you love fickleness, it is best to trust the crowd; take your own side arbitrarily, and someone is bound to love you, no matter how miserable your talents are in relation to anyone else, and if you know the alchemic art of adding obstinance to your denial, you can easily brush off the opinions of those you differ with as "inferior", "unenlightened", or brutally "incorrect". Nevertheless it is even better to trust yourself, but without a care for your own excellence; this is the only hope for an individual who wishes for a still conscience. Indeed, it is the only hope for an individual who wishes to see anything at all beyond the nauseating walls of self.

Philosophy is Dead

Philosophy, correctly understood, has died; its spirit has been replaced with "philologia", or "philognosis" -- "love of learning" and "love of knowledge" respectively -- but has kept the skin of the old word, meaning, as is known, "love of wisdom". These things are generally power-based -- the individual wants to know as much, to learn as much, to compare himself with the man next to him; but not in every case. Nevertheless, wisdom has died in philosophy, just as the soul has died in psychology. It has died, and it continues to die new deaths the moments when it is presumed that it can be taught. We have abandoned our intellectual health, for we have abandoned the pure/practical-reason synthesis, and taken to absorbing ourselves almost completely in the former; and what is wisdom but the concrete application of principles that are relevant to living life? The individual who studies the philosophers is typically not doing it to learn how to adapt his soul to the rythym of the universe, but for various goals that fall short of the attempt: to impress his friends, to impress himself, to find a teaching position, to learn how to solve particular deep problems to learn how to forego them and thereby leave philosophy on the floor -- there is no innate love for wisdom; there is no existential growth; there is no suffering for its sake, there is no rejoicing over it and its fruits; in short, there is no -- dancing!

Thus no wonder it tends to repel everyone these days. A conglmoration of impenetrable jargon. Nothing practical.

Couplet

Love's hopelessly gone, gone, gone
When our claws reveal themselves.

Think!

"Man is hard to discover -- hardest of all for himself.... He, however, has discovered himself who says, "This is my good and evil"; with that he has reduced to silence the mole ad dwarf who say, "Good for all, evil for all."

"This is my way; where is yours?" -- thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way -- that does not exist." -- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die." -- Kierkegaard, Journals

The Death of the Poet

The poet will die,
I said to the sky,
Hot tears in my eyes.

Then where will I go,
And what shall I show,
With whom shall I sigh?

I looked to the road --
It's madness, I know --
While waving goodbye.

Existential Gambling

We think we are unique by virtue of the many concepts and their multifarious relation, but everything under the auspices of concepts is already ground that has been tilled before. True uniqueness lies beyond; it cannot be summarized in words or titles. At best it can only say, "come here, at this time, and see me for yourself," for there is no uniqueness outside of the nakedness of experience. Man must be experienced; to conceptualize him is to destroy him. "If you label me, you negate me." (Kierkegaard)

There needs to be some ideal, unique in itself, that thus concretizes the self in striving for it; for selfhood is actualized through nothing more than following the pathway of ideality. This constant struggling for it must necessarily involve feeling, even pain and suffering; thus passion -- meaning feeling -- is essential; without passion there either is no unique self, or a very limited one. Our age lacks passion, for passion necessarily involves self-assertion; to live aesthetically is to live without self-assertion -- to wait until the cards fall for you -- and therefore without passion. Our age is essentially composed of gamblers; the spirit of the gambler is our Zeitgeist -- the spirit of the times. To live aesthetically is to take the chance that one will be satiated with enough happiness by virtue of it falling from the sky, without the effect of breathing oneself into actuality; living by chance is to gamble existentially. Thus our age prefers the laziness involved with gambling over the pain involved with the greater and absolute happiness of self-assertion. Many a prattling individual will bemoan the futility of gamblers who waste their lives at the roulette tables, when they waste their lives at the table of immanence. Truly, you can find irony anywhere if you look hard enough.

Weakness

You poor wretched lovers -- you have my contempt. Is there not a single soul left in the cosmos who loves unconditionally? Yes, we can strip ourselves of everything conditional, that the loved one before us is given ourselves without the viscosity of our imperfections; we can love regardless of shortcomings, and in so loving we edify the one loved; but we cannot love when tried with separation -- no, we are too hungry for that, too weak without the presence of the other; or even worse: we are too myopic; we cannot see the other without them continually flooding our consciousness in actuality. Better to seek the inferior that can be ascertained now than actually try one's hand at commitment and all the strength that is garnered from it. There is one remarkable girl I knew, brimming with everything immaculate in character -- that is to say, someone different --, who sacrificed every possibility of seeking a man within expedience, that she might aim for the possibility of sealing a relation with her beloved that had roots in seeing him a single time a year. Once a year! I would ask her about it, and her eyes would turn pensive; she would resonate with a momentary sadness of reflection and the beauty that accompanied it, and in her heart I could feel resolution working its way through, I could feel the tension involved in pushing against the tide -- she had faith in the end, and she had faith that the transitory present exacerbated with the pain of desire would only birth an eternal appreciation when this end is finally reached. Is there anyone else like her? Have we all forgotten that life holds the greatest fruits when we push against the wind?

Fragments

Love is interesting. You fall into it. The metaphor is like a cloud that you irrevocably slide into, and it blurs your perception of everything else except the lighthouse your lover resides in. The cloud is very much alive, though at the beginning the sudden transition from the commonplace to the divinity of love is so shocking that you think otherwise. It begins to move, and you have the continual choice of moving with it and sustaining the blurred perception of objectivity, or letting it pass and with it your lover, who now becomes just another landmark you may transcend yourself towards. Why is it so preferable to stick with this cloud? Because in whittling the importance of the world down to a single soul you thereby have the most expedient method for happiness at your disposal. But denial catches up, and actuality has a twist to it that denial cannot hold down.

I listen to Elliott Smith; people ask me why, in the sense of what precisely makes him so special. I tell them: his lyrics reflect the coldness of solitude, the pangs of love, the torment of addiction, and these three things, I say, summarize rather articulately the entire spectrum of human suffering, the entire path we must walk to become ourselves.

I resign myself from society; a few wonder, a few others assume bad intentions. I cannot be quick to blame them; everything different carries the womb of possible crookedness, and for precisely this reason I hold a shallow contempt for people for reducing me to the negative end of this dialectic. I resign myself from society not to hold a secret life, but for the simple preference of my solitude. Why solitude? Because it allows the echo of my thoughts to reach me, and I have no way -- no-one has a way -- of listening to myself in the pureness of actuality. The echo exists by virtue of the elongated walls of the mind; religiously qualified, I call these walls: conscience. Conscience is a secular way of saying something shockingly explicit: God. To refuse solitude is to refuse to listen to God; and we are not called to absolute solitude, for this is impossible by virtue of doing the work we are called to, but there is nothing more dangerous for the soul than neglecting the art of being alone -- and the true artist is the one that Merton hypothesized: the one who knows how to be alone in the crowd.

About preconceptions. They are the playing cards of denial. They prohibit the universe from flooding one's consciousness. Why? Because the individual who practices this witchcraft considers human beings, whether in a limited sense or not, land that must be conquered. They must fit as you see them, or they cannot be tolerated; therefore they are far from human beings; "you" is not instrumental, but intrinsic.

Depression is the somatological result of despair; despair's signpost is the dissonance that stems from a refusal to action; action -- conscious action, where you are the actor -- is based in an ideal. This ideal is either transitory, or eternal; the former is nihilism in relation to the latter, the latter is madness in relation to the former. This eternal ideal is based in the Eternal -- which is to say, God. The ideal itself is the good for the individual, and purity of heart is to will only this (Kierkegaard). What is sin? A refusal to will this one thing, not a refusal to stand within the boundaries of absolutes: "...to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin." (James 4:17, NASB) -- for there are no absolutes. Abraham has proven this. What would seem an absolute in "thou shalt not murder" was transcended by virtue of a commandment of God; for him not to have willed murder would have been, in that case, sin; he knew the right thing to do, and did it. Therefore his faith was justified -- in planning a murder. Swallow this whole and it will cut you. And so it is: there is a relative calling for every individual with a will to be an individual. We are called to movement. "Our nature resides in movement; absolute stillness is death." (Pascal)

What does it mean to be an individual? It means to stand against the external by virtue of flowing with the internal; conversely, to stand against the internal -- God -- is to flow with the external; and if a man's life is found within -- the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:28) -- it is only destruction to consume the bread of the external. This means: being alone, understood psychically, not physically; it means, in short, detaching yourself from your immediate surroundings, and continually responding to the whispers of your conscience. It means being misunderstood. It means having your motives falsely taken for evil. It means suffering, sadness; and yet "when a face is sad a heart may be happy" (Ecclesiastes 7:3).

What is weakness? A refusal to be oneself. What is strength? A willingness to be oneself. What is true happiness? The continuity of movement that resides in willing to be oneself.

Power. It is the narcotic-substitute for living authentically; it is the happiness that exists fleetingly. With power one seeks attention; attention is the demand made by lovelessness. With power one seeks to control the universe; more: in a very real sense make the universe an extension of one's self. It is thus conditional on the world; hence power is a form of weakness. It cannot exist but as a parasite, and when it has nothing to consume it will often create its own reality; thus many schizophrenics are paradigmatically power-hungry. Again, power looks outward; thus the individual with a hunger for power is one you can observe who always sacrifices the authenticity of the moment for a possible advantage in futurity in gaining something through the existence of others. The power-hungry are history's worst communicators.

"It is a misfortune," thought Augusto, "that we need the services of things and have to make use of them. All beauty is marred by use, if not destroyed. The noblest function of things is that of being contemplated. How beautiful is an orange before dinner! In heaven all this will be changed. There our function will be reduced, rather it will be broadened into that of contemplating God and all things in him. Here, in this wretched life, we think only of putting God to use; we try to open him as we do an umbrella, in order that he may protect us from all sorts of evils." -- Miguel de Unamuno, Mist

The concept of treasure: to remain hidden. If all saw the complete unnerving beauty of a girl a certain boy held dear, would she not lose value in his eyes? She would be reduced to the commonplace; the commonplace is the antithesis to everything valuable. Shame: keeping sacred what is hidden from the outer world that does not understand. Is shame not then -- necessary; is it not also -- good?

Pushkin

"The curse is, if you lose your sense,
They shun you like a pestilence,
And all your ways are tied.
They'll chain you to a madman's yoke,
And through the prison-bars provoke
You like a beast inside."
-- Pushkin

Dream

A dream last night: almost in a classroom setting, there is a middle-aged lady sitting in a desk in the middle of the room; she is somewhat overweight, her skin is tanned. She is conspicuously unhappy, of the angry/agitated sort. I remember her calling me out, rudely, and demanded I answer a question. I did, with prudence; but it wasn't reciprocated -- she stopped me in the middle, mocked me boldly and heartlessly, and disregarded me as something inhuman. But I wouldn't tolerate it. So without even thinking of what I was doing, in an alcoholic-emotional haze that bordered on a trance, I went up to her, stared her straight in the eyes, and slapped her on the face. The recoil! She was incredulous, and what happens next? I am conscious of myself on death-row, with the thought that my lawyer is trying incessantly to appeal a court-ruling that never took place. Why this dream hits home for me I cannot quite understand.

Religion

Superficial religiousness is the most abysmal of superficiality; it smacks one in the face the hardest, it nauseates the intellect the deepest. Go ahead, poor man, poor girl, love and live with pagan sensuality those who satisfy your own external test, who are attractive enough or well-thought of enough by others; you are a Christian, you read your bible, you pray from time to time, you hold the correct stereotypes and dogmatic conclusions; you believe that Christ has saved you, and you emit fumes that seem sincere in loving your neighbor. But then one comes along, without satisfying your external demands, without any attractive idiosyncrasies that a simple person has caught onto, leading to the admiration by the crowd and therefore yourself; the commandment is set up on pedestals in your mind, and you are demanded to make something pressing: a choice. But you refuse to engage him, and he wanders to the shadows of the crowd, justifiably bitter towards the religion you claim to worship; who can blame him for thinking otherwise? But it doesn't matter too much does it? It is, after all, their fault for refusing the value of your company, and Christ goes with the deal; they are in the wrong, they are the heretics, they deserve your sympathy -- and how expedient of sympathy to make one feel righteous, even if its roots are based in nothing at all! A narcotic.

Once the usefulness of self-deception withers away, there is nothing left for you to hold on to; you are then forced to exist, to face God in the face, and actually assert yourself. But this will never happen. You will always have the baseless sentiments of the crowd to absorb yourself in. The last thing you need to think of is -- thinking. All you want is positive attention, and you will assert whatever power within your perception to attain that end -- for to have the attention of others is also to have their love, and a desire for love is an indication of its nonexistence.

But were you to love boldly, unconditionally, without dancing with the ephemeral, then you would see that there is nothing to see in the external to judge a person by; that it is beneath this exterior that determines the person, and that this underlying life-force -- this soul --, regardless of its presentation, is something attractive, something that either needs edification, or a sharing of the brilliance it resonates.

With God and without love, or with love and without God? This is the apparent choice these days; religion is so dry a thing, so conditional, so devoid of personal relation, of benevolence towards others that actually transcends the commandment of loving your neighbor; the individual in realization of this fact is prematurely pressed with the conclusion that he must reject religion and God entirely in order to love freely in the coldness of absolute solitude. And when he takes this step, and valliantly resigns himself from the decadence of the crowd, when he is sitting in his solitude and the sorrow that comes with it, when he finally calls out to God in the authenticity of spirit perhaps for the first time in his life, his response will birth a new life for him. He will see the universe through a dialogue with the Eternal. And nothing will matter, therefore everything will become beautiful.

My Scintillating Danish Guru

"If a person possessed a letter that he knew or believed contained information about what he had to consider his life’s happiness, but the characters were thin and faint and the handwriting almost illegible, then, presumably with anxiety and agitation, he would read it most passionately again and again and at one moment derive one meaning, at the next moment another, according to how he would explain everything by a word he believed that he had deciphered with certainty, but he would never progress beyond the same uncertainty with which he had begun. He would stare, more and more anxiously, but the more he stared, the less he would see. His eyes would sometimes be filled with tears, but the more frequently this happened to him, the less he would see. In the course of time, the writing would become fainter and less legible; finally the paper itself would crumble away, and he would have nothing left but tear-filled eyes." -- Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Discourse on deception, par excellence. Have you ever been deceived? Have you ever breathed?

Melancholy II

I do not prefer my melancholy, but I cannot keep from praising the immaculate landscape of subjectivity it helps me see, and this cannot be experienced in any other state as solidly and deeply as when in the mode of melancholy; it is like a man who is tortured every so often, but on a mountain-top that overlooks a breathtaking view, so transcending for him that he continually oscillates between being ravished by the view and being conscious of his tormentors. But the metaphor is not entirely appropriate; it is not physical pain that is the problem when in sorrow, but psychological. We shall never sacrifice our sorrow, for it is sorrow that is the primer on which all colors of life find their accentuation; it is this black backdrop of sadness that this ground of repetition rests -- repetition understood in the transcendent sense, as getting the world back you have once lost -- and who could dare whisper his way back into pure existence, crawling up the rope of happiness, bit by bit, until he retrospectively realizes he has it, without the joy of capturing it, when repetition unveils the strong rush of euphoria at every moment joy strikes us -- a song we hear, a smile we see, a thought that evokes our laughter, and there we feel her hiding cunningly in the foreground: joy, joy, joy. Our sorrow may wade perpetually in the sea of our souls at these moments, but the contrasting joy of repetition does stand as a mark against it, and it is this mark that we dedicate our lives. To attempt to escape sorrow is twofold madness: firstly because it holds for us the potentiality for the greatest spurts of happiness we know, and most importantly because we cannot do it by fiat -- it is the striving to escape it that causes the greatest pain.

But melancholy must be consummated, and again, nobody would dare prefer it to a life of happiness. Melancholy falters being, and that is the essence of it. In being drawn towards reflection, melancholy is the magnifying glass of despair, for reflection is the branches that constrain one's becoming-alive, one's transition towards being; but this is positive, albeit in a negative light: it helps to grasp the depth of one's weakness, one's shallow defiance in refusing the eternal -- that is, our pre-packaged happiness as possibility, our hope, the refusal to follow which leads us to despair, the ideal by which we must strive in order to continually become ourselves, which I cannot help but call that most excellent of cosmopolitans: God. A man longs for a girl that his reason knows he cannot have, and this longing constitutes his unhappiness, his melancholy -- all melancholy has roots -- and while it may reveal itself deviously by making it appear that melancholy shares the same root-structure as despair, this is far from the case -- one's sadness as sadness is not necessarily a mode of despair; it is possible in every way imaginable to negate one's despair while continually affirming the hope of the eternal in one, thus it is possible to be happy, while remaining -- sad. Thus it says in Ecclesiastes: a sad face may hide a happy heart. Happiness spings from within, from an eternal center -- a center that we can control; sorrow acts as a catalyst on this happiness, but it works from a different direction: it consumes from outside, towards a center that can never be swallowed like it can be when we twist our wills toward the nonexistent goal of despair.

The important thing -- the absolutely central idea -- is to keep moving, for melancholy, as touched on, acts as an anti-catalyst in drawing us to the nothingness of reflection and thus simultaneously keeping us from striving for the eternal and becoming ourselves -- keep moving, but not in the direction of feeling, but aimed at the eternal; feeling will only leave one in a transitory diversion from one's despair, and as soon as that fleeting episode of seeming happiness has subsided, there lies with more intensity the great abyss of despair at one's feet, strengthened precisely by negative repetition -- that is, the contrast-effect into non-being.

Melancholy

We cannot live without our melancholy. She is ever-willing to leave our presence, at the mere suggestion, the mere assertion of our will, a determination towards movement, a shedding of the infinite silence of its haunting chrysalis and the stillness she hides in -- she is willing; she is standing at the door, a face that appears to hold the deepest of ambivalence, but it is this moment that she melts, at this moment we melt, and she is taken again, not in open arms, but removed to the remote corner. We may stare, but we do not dare touch; it is at our touch that she dissovles into happiness, and we cannot have this. Happiness does not have this mysterious beauty about it; it does not have the seedling, the promise, of something that we perpetually find ourselves wagering will consummate in something ineffably brilliant, charming, ravishing. No, no, melancholy holds her mystique better than happiness could ever hold our spirits, and this incredible beauty inherent to it, to the whole process at times excruciating, this infinitesimal wonder, so peripherally seen by the mind in its soreness in the face of pain, I tell you, my wise ones who know this ground with your own feet, this is our motivation in sustaining the doors of sadness, locked from the inside. Happiness, pure happiness, is too boring, too bland, too common. Give us our suffering; throw out the possibility of escaping the necessity of its course. Suffer boldly, as you love boldly, and your name will be refashioned: impenetrability. We may be pushed, but we are not broken; we may despair, but we do not remain in the coldnesss of its deathgrip. Our melancholy does not negate our happiness; it becomes it. But first we must accept it; for there is but one impossibility: conceiving it to be within the ground of possibility in escaping it.

Happiness

The mediocre is always the goal of the path of least resistance; this is a law of life. You will always have to assert yourself, and inevitably this will demand a degree of pain. But this is the price of happiness. The greater the pain, the more luminous the reward, the more euphoric your victory.

Facticity, Attraction

The consequence of existential nihilism -- of living one's life without the continual affirmation of some transcendent meaning that sticks past the ten o'clock news -- is inexorably one of trivial attention toward insignificance, a magnification of the otherwise worthless, transforming it into the essential: one's transitory and superficial life calling that seeps up in one's mind for as long as the stupidity takes, and then off it flies to nothingness until again it finds a task at hand, a soul to consume. This is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the cleaning passion of the housewife, but only when the desire to clean is not predicated by a higher telos, for it often is: the house of the wife is a sort of exterior evidence of her superiority, so she thinks, and her commitment to cleaning it (and tormenting others to fulfill her wishes) has this end in mind; but when there is a ceaseless prattle about the necessity of keeping everything spotless, things in order, for no apparent (or inapparent) reason, then here you have revealed despair in its nakedness. A man's worth is measured not by his facticity, but by his commitment to a relative firmness of transcendental meaning, on two points: 1) how deep and pragmatic this meaning is, in the sense of how much it will aid him in his life as it relates to happiness, and 2) how committed he is to it -- but fundamentally it is a question of assertion of one's will, one's own self, in the face of what otherwise is determinism. The man who has a commitment to his fellow man, or to his country, or to his lover, are all stiff ideals, but so long as this commitment is itself lax, the man is no better than the nihilist who cleans his apartment with a flick of the will that resembles that of a martyr.

And who do we see most often praised in society, most often admired and desired, than those who live their lives according to the rule-book of externality? And what is this externality a sub-group of other than facticity? Granted, a good deal of facticity has to do with our voluntarily action upon it -- my muscles will be larger if I work to grow them, my hair will be shorter if I work to cut it, etc. -- but aside from those rare actions that require effort, ultimately to praise or revere a person on the basis of his facticity is a very pathetic and crude thing to do; but our society is saturated to the very marrow with it, and there is no greater example than that nauseating non-sequitur that involves the implicit belief that all attractive individuals are therefore in possession of some greater character than those who lack this attractiveness. The argument goes as follows:

All attractive people are good people
X. is attractive
:. X. is a good person

The attractiveness in question here is not necessarily physical in the sexual sense; the look that an anonymous girl gives a guy may register to his mind the smell of idiosyncrasy, and have nothing sexual or physically attractive to it, but in being what it is symbolizes a sort of uniqueness that he wishes to be a part of, perhaps for elitist (therefore power) reasons. Upon noticing her look, he will say to himself, "aha! she surely must be something interesting," and thus will hold unconsciously in his mind the conviction that she is better than a good deal of other people for no other reason than because of a particular time crystalized in history absorbed his attention.

The only effect of living in such a mindset is a blindness to the objectivity of the wholeness of one's personality; and often this becomes something worse: at times when someone is found to be valuable according to the arbitrary rules mentioned above, the progression will not finalize in a sense of blindness toward the whole person, but even a standard based on his negative characteristics, that way these negativities can willy-nilly become the basis on which justice breeds. There is no better way of eradicating that agitating conviction of badness than by using this badness as a foundation for a standard for goodness, thus making badness -- good. If X. has a negative stance toward a problem acknowledged by a person who admires him on the basis of the law of attraction, Y., in seeking to annihilate this negativity, and thereby keep her deity in the boundless confines of perfection, will simply look at those who consider his problem to be negative and say, "but they should do as X. does; why not?" for he is, after all, too good to err so conspicuously. But to be sure, there is no escape from the omnipotence of conscience, and the person who engages such an attitude will only further harm himself, and the stain of this psychological pain will only further, alas, the fanaticism-spirit that keeps the world divided into those-who-are-attractive and those-who-aren't.

Such a person will only grow helplessly sensitive, for all pain taken in a spirit that repels it garners a sensitivity to the life that fosters it; this sensitivity will only create a greater wall between the real world and those under the auspices of the in-group of attractiveness; and this will only mean -- a greater inclination toward dichotomizing the world as mentioned previously. The cycle is very nasty.

And so you see, you have this power to discern the difference between two very subtle paths. Do not wager on the basis of fact, but on the true basis of character -- that exists by nature of spirit, of the nobility of work, the courage to be oneself, the audacity to stand against this world and present whatever authenticity one knows to the fold. Join the crowd of the truly great men throughout history. Do not look on the outward appearance, but on the intentions, the motivations, the inclinations of those around you. If these inclinations hold in their midst something of badness, consider the person who is resisting these inclinations. For it is the person that transcends inclinations, facticity, and such; and unless the person is considered, you will only harm yourself and the world you unjustly neglect.

Dark

What would the world be without repression, without displacement, without contempt, without hatred, without anti-depressants, drugs, deviations – in short, a world with consequences, faced without any insulating weakness? A wandering conglomeration of despairing bodies that begs its outsiders to shoot each one in the face. Are we not more honorable a breed to deny all this, to part with the ways that keep individuals from facing the horrifying nakedness of their despair, even if this makes us depressed, though with enough will to live as to leave the shimmering possibility of honest happiness coming our way? Observe your actions and you will likely find a cover-up for something deeper and nastier that you feel at the back of your mind in moments of solitude, moments away from the dazzling transcendence offered by this world that seems now to specialize in the sensational – that nonetheless has a solution, and while this solution places you in the territory of truth, it is a territory that involves the unhappiness in noting the untruth that the world around you entertains – nevertheless an unhappiness with a sense of hope, an unhappiness with high-flying moments of enchanting euphoria, that when it grasps you at those moments you could never foresee, you feel as if you were the living Christ observing children at the serious work of being carefree.

My Own Bad Writing

I'm sure I would write ten thousand times more if I didn't think my writing was awful. It's as if every facet of my creativity is against using common words and phrases; as if there were not great writers of the past who wrote conservatively. The root of it is probably my perfectionism. How bad is my perfectionism? It took me approximately six months to find a computer that suited me; analogously, I cannot create unless I know it suits me, unless I know it is ideal. It was painful beyond anything I've experienced just to discipline myself to write first drafts as first drafts -- as the skeletons upon which I would return with a fresh mind and add the remaining parts. On the top of a novel I have been neglecting too long in writing there is, in size 48 font, Hemingway's great secret: "All first drafts are shit." The most severe aspect is that I expect myself to write as good as a few of the greatest writers in history; and I still am yet to find a book that I consider, as a unity, to be something written excellently. I demand an ideal of myself I have never seen in the concrete; this is my doorstep to insanity.

But an interesting thing happened just prior to writing this post. I had been for the last hour or so in a shallow depression over my own ability as a philosopher -- not so much my ideas as my perceived inability to present them adaquetely -- when I opened up this laptop, less than a week and a half old, and see extremely lightly shaded blotches at the bottom right of my screen. At this moment my unhappiness that was based on my philosophical abilities transitioned to something as silly as blotches on a screen; I did every possible thing to see if there wasn't an indention in the screen, and eventually I realized it was a momentary fix, something that happened when the screen had been shut a while and needed a few seconds to warm up again. I remember I felt happy; happy in the exact same sense I had been when I had solved much deeper problems in the past, such as the one that just yielded to the screen-related one. I have just proven the relativity of happiness; that happiness has no absolute external attachment. I have always felt this, known it intuitively, but now it has blossomed in a concrete example. I no longer wonder: is it possible that someone can feel the same unhappiness in not having ten dollars as someone else not eating? Yes, it is. There is an adaptation to happiness; what is at first bewildering and proportionately a cause of unhappiness may eventually, through repetition and expectation, become something of a footnote in the book of unhappiness. There are children starving in foreign countries; but there are also spoiled American adolescents -- there is no reason to think that their unhappiness is not the same, that the former cannot be happier than the latter.

Odd thoughts. In the last four or five days I have written approximately 5800 words, all of which are dedicated to short stories -- a new writing-form for me, inspired by none other than Kafka himself; prior to him I considered short stories to be the historical writer's warm-up to writing novels. But this simply isn't the case. One story was inspired by a horrifyingly beautiful dream I had about a love that promised something wonderful but never actualized; I awoke at 4am, and in the midst of having my thoughts drowned by melancholy I decided to use my pain as a means of expression, essentially a means of communication. Few writers know how to write about love without delving into woods saturated with emotion; I shall at least make an attempt to particularize the experience from my own standing. The whole story is evidence of the humor of God; I am also writing a short story revolving around a murder. And with both the words and feelings are flowing without any obscurity.

At so many moments I have the palpable feeling that writing is something foreign to my capacities; but I know that I'm a better writer than so many people I've read (which could be taken as a bit of circular reasoning: if I write like I think writing should be and consider a good deal of other writers to be subordinate to me, then those who I consider subordinate, in doing the same thing with their writing, can easily conclude the same with me). The thought that precedes my resolution to sit down and write often causes a revulsion in me, and no matter how hard I try to put forth my best effort, I still seem to fall short of what I perceive myself capable of. To read my own work is oftentimes blatantly impossible.

But eventually it will work out. Something will be published, no matter how tarnished the material itself is; people will approve of me -- there is always someone who approves -- and people will disapprove -- just like Stalin, who called Dostoevsky a "superlatively bad writer", or Tolstoy, who considered his writing to be immoral to the point of unreadable --, and I will naturally take the place of those who approve. The perception of my writing will thereby have the possibility of becoming colored with the admiration of others; and this neurotic self-contempt for my writing abilities will become a thing of the past. Or maybe I won't be published. Ever. Maybe the rejection letters will reach the ceiling; maybe they will reproach me for being didactic, pseudo-intellectualistic, flamboyant, pedantic. I could take life a lot less seriously. And maybe this is a goal that is within my power to reach now. Maybe this conviction of a calling is simply a delusion. I don't know.

Bad Writing

Writing today is excrement, and apparently convention has an appropriate diet. The essence of it is something of a stacatto presentation of ideas that smack very faintly of an attempted spirit of Hemingway, but unfortunately the one spirit that drank himself to oblivion, not the one that reinvented writing. Unlike prior to the 20th century, which was overwrought with a violent use of adjectives and adverbs, today's writers have entirely forgotten how to use such things; what is left is an oftentimes failed wit without sufficient explanation, no psychological depth, a sea of dialogue whose fish are helplessly dying, all clouded in words and word-phrases that a moderately educated American would use -- that is to say, something utterly boring and without inspiration or passion. Of all the writers alive today, of all the endless novels I have half-hopefully looked through, there is only one that comes to mind as being worthy, one that has rescued the present by holding with him a remnant of the past: Milan Kundera. His very name seems to the American to symbolize the obscurity the air of which his writing style breathes, and so much the worse for that, and so much the worse for this: his writing seems to a lazy subjectivity to be hedging the line of didactic philosophical thought, but nevertheless his Unbearable Lightness of Being, a work that centers on the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrance, is considered a contemporary classic, and like all classics, it is beginning to be forgotten. His present work I have heard nothing exciting about; he is the Czech reflection of his American counterpart, John Updike, who also has written masterpieces, who also has his genius obscured by a skyline of bad writing, sustained by very bad readers, very superficial emotional quips, and who seems to have melted under the pressure to be great without effort, rather than eternally noble with effort.

Two things this writing-community needs to regain its composure and actually entail the possibility of nesting a luminary in its midst: darkness and poetic prose. The incarnations I am thinking of go no further than Kafka and Nabokov, the former who was dark but conservative to the point of being poetic only in retrospect, the latter whose poetic beauty shone through every single word he wrote but nevertheless wrote on shaded grounds -- grounds with psychological darkness but without a darkness of environment that gave his characters the inability to fully reach the light of humanity. With Kafka one perceives the dark matter of one's soul that one would otherwise choose to neglect, sees and perpetuates the stare until he is exorcised of the demons Kafka masterfully brings to light; with Nabokov one sees everything from the commonplace to the particularly depraved through the lens of immaculate presentation, and one thereby learns to see the world, even in its nasty and decadent aspects, as something with roots, something that has a source, something that can be given greater attention and hence from which can be stolen detail -- for it is, after all, the details in life that ultimately make one thing different from another, memorable in contrast with another. Detail is why a man or a woman you have fallen for is not a body snatched at random from a pool of 6 billion that satisfies your desires for the simple sake of expedience.

The problem goes back to our revulsion for language, our ignorance of its capacity; our age has become too scientific, too positivistic, too statistical to ever play according to the rules of unbounded expression, and this all goes back to our education, where even the literature books are filled to the brim with superfluous historical information over the writer whose work seems to take a backseat. It would not be inappropriate to sit down an English major whose paths cross with yours and ask him a simple question: why this and not history? At least history is interesting because it has a broader context, because it contains information that transcends fact, information that is capable of edifying, not to mention information that is actually useful in making one appear interesting. This is not to say that the lives of the writers are boring, but only that without a little freedom given to the reader to actually enjoy his work, the writer becomes an abstraction, someone without blood, without spirit, without passion -- someone terribly like the person reading, and this can't help but be repugnant. Words become interesting only as soon as they magnify an experience penned by the author; without this they are only in the way. And authors today do have fascinating experiences; they only lack a flashlight with which to make them seen.

Goodnight.