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I have resolved my conflict. You all must not hate me, I am in a fairly derranged state of mind.
These are the questions I can now answer: What is worth doing? What is the point? To absorb life. To stop ignoring the sky and feel the full weight of that 14.7 pounds per square inch of nothing that can raze you if you let it. In short, to appreciate beauty.
I'm thinking of specific moments in my life when i've come closest to understanding the infinite expanse of space. Wow wow wow.
Well dang. Nihilism outside, under the crushing weight of the "other," is just cynicism. Only a hardened heart can fail to see wonder and connect with it. We are not born with existential angst. We carve it out of us as we carve a life out of our world. Ah oh my I feel eversomuch better now. Its too easy to miss life these days. Too many people still waiting inside the station never see the train coming.
If I lust for power, it is because I believe I have a pure heart.
Sad that this is not the case. Sad? No, saying that is escapist cliche that I use to bypass actual thought. It is not sad, it is the truth. Let me have that last paragraph again. I can do it better.
If I lust for power, it is because I believe I have a pure heart.
I do not have a pure heart. My blackened heart causes my blackened lusts to appear transparent. I seek to obliterate my desires. Make a careful note of the paradox in that statement. My very goals preclude their own fulfillment.
I want adventure.
I want dangerous love.
I want Leia.
I want denument.
But what for? Here's our tragic flaw, we have profound emotions with nothing profound to say. And I feel that there is nothing new under the sun. What is worth dying for? Tell me that. I am not convinced enough of my faith to believe in miracles half the time; I have a hard enough time believing my own professions of faith. When I was younger, I had these convictions. I believed that good and evil really fought on an epic stage. Now I believe even more strongly in good and evil, but I can't find the stage. What is worth dying for?
if someone responds with "what is worth living for" i willl commit my life to reidiculing you mercilessly since there doesn't seem to be any other point to it.
This is typically the point in the blog where I lose my train of thought, fail to tie things together, and get frustrated at my lack of literary facility. I don't feel that coming on tonight. It is replaced with a feeling in my stomach that I recognize from the few times I've ridden on roller-coasters. The sinking let-down of everyday life.
Ouch. No, no no... Its the sinking let-down of MY everyday life. Perhaps geniuses can participate in the dialog of life (which this blog is a sad attempt at), but what are the billions of slightly-above-average grunts like me supposed to do? Procreate? Destroy our planet? Study the very marvels of biological inefficency that we are? Well, we carve out meaning. Some of us carve more than others. i'm don't know if I have it in me today to carve much more. It all just ends up an innumerable amount of holes in an infintely large universe anyway.
Forgive the nihilism. Or don't. I will continue screaming about why I feel like screaming about the fact that there is nothing worth getting all excited about. The funny thing is I cant decide if this sinking feeling is the same kind of angst that will put averil through college and then some, or the kind that stumps the most articulate of men. Neither is better nor worse than the other - one is just more common.
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying 325
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience 330
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink 335
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 340
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
-From T.S. Elliott's The Wasteland
Were I to have the soul of a poet, would it be this troubled?
Page 205, Testimony - finally nearing the end of this book. I have been working much lately hanging out as well, darn social life getting in the way of my reading. I try to fight it sometimes but then people get angry with me. People who make my life less fun. So i go. But here's a good excerpt:
Don't believe humanists, citizens, don't believe prophets, don't believe luminaries - they'll fool you for a penny. Do your won work, don't hurt people, try to help them. Don't try to save humanity all at once, try saving one person first. It's a lot harder. To help one person without harming another is very difficult. It's unbelievably difficult. That's where the temptation to save all of humanity comes from. And then, inevitably, along the way you discover that all humanity's happiness hinges on the destruction of a few hundred million people, that's all. A trifle.
Nothing but nonsense in the world, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once said. It's that nonsense that I try to depict.
And so forth. I think it speaks for itself rather well, however I have the benefit of a large amount of helpful context as well, so leave comments, please. There is also the obligatory connection to dad mentioned casually... which is something I felt far before I knew from Shostakovich's work.
File under 'P' for "Promotion."
I have finally done it. I have signed up for a freeipods.com thingy. Why, you ask, would I hold out for so long, and finally give in? Well, primarily because they have the easiest offer EVER to complete these days.
Please, friends, countrymen, click here and sign up for the RealRhapsody promotion. It costs a buck, and I will paypal you two bucks if you complete the offer. It goes into effect instantly, and you can cancel the service tomorrow if you like. Seriously, I just did it for kordik and it was easy. You make a profit. Badda-bing, badda-boom.
Anyway, all I need are five people to do it and I've got myself a color 20 gig ipod. I suggest you all take advantage of the world's easiest promotion and work on getting yourself one too.