Fear is (ele)mental.
Insanity exists on the extremes of the acceptance of one’s perceived reality. One must always take care to not accept too much or too little.
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Reality is irrelevant. Resistance is futile.
“Wise and cynical”
Plath used that phrase as if it was a given, as if those two words naturally belonged together. Wisdom and cynicism. Brother and sister, they are. Two peas in a pos. Inseparable as a teenage boy from the girl he loves.
Perhaps they are. “Ignorance is bliss,” right? “With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief,” wrote The Teacher.
After all, how can one, having risen above the foolishness of conventional thinking, look then at the intellectual and spiritual abyss that is humanity and see anything in which to find joy?
It used to be that I could see the budge of new life in a woman and could find nothing but joy. “Oh, the potential!” I would think. These days, however, I find nothing but sorrow. “There’s another one for the wolves,” I say. “Another ear to be tagged by the farmer. Another piece of meat to be herded to the slaughterhouse. Stripped of its life, stripped of its guts, stripped of its bones, it will be just another soulless slab of steak to be consumed by the ever-hungering King of Earth. Self-service and his queen, Greed, demand a never-ending flow of flesh. And they’ll get it.”
Yes, “every day I go to school and study humans,” and the more I learn, the more I mourn for them. Standing in the oasis, I couldn’t see the desert for the trees. But from the mountain top, I survey that very same landscape and see nothing but a barren wasteland devoid of any life. Sand here and sand there. Incalculable numbers who’s sole purpose is to be blown about by the wind. Today they form a dune here and a hill there simply because the wind so wills it. But tomorrow there will be a different wind and all the work of the former will be lost and no one will know the difference.
The wise, then, will still watch from the mountaintop with tear filled eyes as the whole world goes to Sheol in a hand basket. Powerless to change the unwilling and unknowing masses, they will exclaim forever,
“VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY!”
“Love beats ‘in love’!”
Why is it that people put this “in love” on such a high pedestal? They worship it as if it’s some sort of god, as if nothing else matters except that “in love” gets its way, as if everything somehow boils down to this one concept. Even YAH Himself does not rank so high on their scale of relevance.
Sometimes I wonder do people really believe this bull. Then I answer my own question; no, of course they don’t. And I’d like some of those poor impressionable souls who think they do to consider what they would believe if they had to live on the receiving end of the ill effects of such a superficial, self-centered, arbitrarily generated (I’m sorry. “Socially evolved.” Sometimes I forget that popularity equals truth-value and that the western world is all of the world which truly exists.) philosophy.
No, really. What would your reaction be if it was your other half (and yes, folks, “the two shall be one” was not a metaphor. Yes, folks, an eternal union is just that, two things becoming one thing forever. And yes, folks, He was sober when He decided on multiple genders.) who decided that some (rather inconsistent) feelings were more important than you. Imagine, for a moment, that, as you near your tenth anniversary with that special someone and you prepare to celebrate with the whole family – you have you, your love, and your three young children – you come home one day to find that he or she is “in love” (and maybe fore dramatic effect, we’ll add “in bed”) with the secretary.
How do you react? Is it, “You’re ‘in love.’ What else matters?” Or maybe it’s, “Just follow your heart.” Or, “Just do whatever feels right.” Or, “Do whatever makes you happy.”
Nah, my guess is that it would be a little more along the lines of, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? What do you mean you ‘felt like it’? Where’s your self respect? Where’s your honor? Where’s your sense of responsibility? You ‘feel like it’! Well, guess what, there are more important things than feelings. Feelings change like the wind but you exercise self-control. Now quit acting like a preteen little girl, grow up, and get that home wrecker out of my house. Then we can talk about your feelings (which are important) and learn what we can change to get them back on track.”
Now you might no use so many words. A simple “Screw you!” and fists of fury might be the language in which you choose to speak. Nonetheless, when translated, you’ve said the same thing. You have certainly not said, “Do what feels right.” You have certainly abandoned the very thing you were so sure of a few moments ago.
Yeah, we can pretend but we all know that there are many things infinitely more important than “in love”. Christ beats “in love”. Other people beat “in love”. Respect, honor, responsibility, truth, peace, etc. beat “in love”. LOVE beats “in love”!
I pity the one who would deny his children or his friends, his dreams, his parents, or anything else of significance in order to acknowledge such a fleeting instability as that. More than I pity him, I fear him. He will – and I say this with the certainty of a mountain’s resting place – undoubtedly cause more unhappiness in his lifetime than can ever be caused by his learning to control and interpret his feelings and to act on what is solid, what is eternal, and what is revered by all wise men – TRUTH.