After a heavy meal, you feel drowsy and lethargic and plain lazy. So you retire to bed early, hoping for a rest. As you lie on the side, deep inside you mixed feelings of loneliness and horniness and nostalgia and dual opposing forces of being drawn to and repelled by members of the opposite sex hit you with a hurricane force. Somewhere haunting words of a woman who experienced and practiced onanism, teenage sex, and intense, excruciating loneliness echoed in your mind:
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. Learn to accept it and love it. Once you manage to do that, you will know true independence and will not care for casual sex and an easy romp in the hay. You let loneliness tunnel deep into you until it hits your soul. And then a strange thing happens, you feel your soul expand and grow and understand not only yourself but others as well. Don't expect to outgrow loneliness. Don't think it will go away. It may lie dormant while you are having an intense sex session, but it surely will come back and knock on the door of your soul once the sex is over and you look closely at the face of your sex partner, at his sex organ and back to his face and you wonder if you love him enough to die for him or conversely he for you. You have doubts, so you ask him. And he says, after two seconds of hesitation, of course, I do, baby, but why you ask. You know then he has lied. You are glad he does not ask you the same question. But you remember once when you were young and green and first gingerly yet eagerly at the same time explored the sensations of love and sex or whatever the hell people call it, with the local boy four houses down the street, he swore up and down that he loved you and would die for you and you believed him until you discovered he slept with your best friend, too. So, now you give up hope to find people who will understand you, cherish you, and love you as much as, if not more than, they love themselves; people who will be sweet and tender and patient to you; people who will forgive you and stay with you and be there for you. You give up to find somebody to fill the huge space now occupied by the queen called loneliness. The best that you ever hope for is for you to understand yourself and accept who you are and find out what you want out of life and go for it. All the memories and nostalgia and longings and wishful thinking that come to you late at night or at odd moments when you listen to the oldies on the radio only serve as a reminder that life is a long process of coping with disappointment and yet we all long for love, for the impossible.
Monday, October 25, 2010
What we talk about when we talk about Love"
The captioned is one of Raymond Carver's best and better-known stories. You read it and at the end you realized you were lonely and didn't know a damn thing about love. You recall sharing the story with a woman who said she loved you. It didn't make an impact on her. Alarm bells rang deep and long in your heart then. And your intuition was right. She was into games of ego-sustenance. She didn't love you. Not really. Once again, you realized that you didn't know a thing about women. But you soldiered on. Two more women later told you they loved you. Did that make you a serial womanizer or a hopeless, pathetic romantic? You didn't know then. You don't know now. Today you called a friend an inquisitive womanizer. He seemed surprised. But that could be an act. As you explained to him, being a womanizer is not bad by and in of itself. As long as one treats all ladies, including one's spouse, with respect and tender loving care, who says womanizing is bad? Some men were born to love women, to be hopelessly attracted to the opposite sex, to fall victim to their feminine charms and beauty.
Last week, a woman told you that she wanted to go on a trip with you, out of town, just to get away from the tedium and rut of life for a few days. She said she was depressed. You said you would think about that. You told her money was getting tight with you. You had some problems with your stock portfolio. She laughed, saying that she would pay for all of the expenses. You didn't tell her your reluctance was having more to do with Laura and the woman you still love dearly than with money.
Rain was falling hard tonight. A downpour in the desert. Arizona was overdue for a deluge. After the rain which lasted for two hours, the temperature dropped fast. The ground gave off an odor of life and fecundity, an earthy, musty, pungent smell which made him feel lonely and horny. Twice he picked up his iPhone and twice his finger froze, unable to punch in her number.
Unlike his friend, he was not a womanizer. He was into real love.
Last week, a woman told you that she wanted to go on a trip with you, out of town, just to get away from the tedium and rut of life for a few days. She said she was depressed. You said you would think about that. You told her money was getting tight with you. You had some problems with your stock portfolio. She laughed, saying that she would pay for all of the expenses. You didn't tell her your reluctance was having more to do with Laura and the woman you still love dearly than with money.
Rain was falling hard tonight. A downpour in the desert. Arizona was overdue for a deluge. After the rain which lasted for two hours, the temperature dropped fast. The ground gave off an odor of life and fecundity, an earthy, musty, pungent smell which made him feel lonely and horny. Twice he picked up his iPhone and twice his finger froze, unable to punch in her number.
Unlike his friend, he was not a womanizer. He was into real love.
Who and Where Am I, and What Will Happen to Me When I Die?
Who and Where Am I, and What Will Happen to Me When I Die?
Very few men have many original ideas, ideas that they come up largely by themselves and from which they view themselves and the world. Most of us, if we are lucky, have one or two. And we work on them constantly, repeating and refining them. That makes cowards cum hypocrites who don't have a single idea of their own tartly and pointedly complain that we sound like a broken record. They think that by making fun of us, they get a satisfaction that they show their displeasure and contempt. Little do they know that they sow their own self-destruction. Humans have long memories for hurtful feelings and very limited capacity for forgiveness. They instinctively thirst for vengeance, for exacting justice, for punishing those who dared to be insolent to them. That's why wise men throughout the ages have counseled us to be circumspect with our words for they can cause mayhem and bloodshed. But fools like me, because of inflated ego, don't give a damn about the advice and thus manage to irritate and infuriate almost everybody. Take the case of the existence of God as a personhood, most humans subscribe to this notion. I wonder if they embrace the notion out of personal contemplation and conviction or simply out of mindless acceptance of socialization and indoctrination.
Jews were credited with inventing monotheism. But I suppose other peoples in the world are also capable of conceiving a single God, the top dog, the Supreme Being who rules the universe. Such a notion is not hard to come up with although polytheism was more common with humans in ancient times. But seriously folks, do you really believe that Moses found The Ten Commandments from God in Mt Sinai, that Jesus was Son of God, that Muhammad was the last prophet on earth, and that Buddha was right when he talked about eternal reoccurrence and reincarnation? I have not met personally Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and Siddhartha so I only go by what others have said about them. The only thing I found credible and common about these gentlemen was that they all stressed love and charity, although Jesus and Muhammad were also quoted of speaking passionately about vengeance and punishment. I regarded these founders of religion as mere men and had no divine connection none whatsoever simply because to my way of thinking there is no divinity to begin with. What we have are manifestations of energy and a vast ignorance of why the Big Bang occurred. Any talk about God as a personhood to whom humans can pray to and ask for help smacks of human sophistry and self-deception. True humans always go for honesty and dignity. There is no need to rely on a fiction in order to gain strength.
But enough bellyaching about metaphysics or mention of scumbags and sordid beings. I write in order to get off steam, and not to look for admirers with whom I can snicker at the world, neither do I write in order to search for a pocket mirror and studio audience. What I search for when I write is myself because sometimes in the process of stringing words together I recognize that I am not the only thing of beauty in this world and that there is burnished teak as well as alabaster, rippling mahogany as well as smooth, soothing silk. I write because I like to hack through a thorn forest. I want to emerge from it bloodied but defiant and unbowed. And when I do, I would give off a blood-curdling scream to startle the sleeping simians and docile sheep in the valley down below. I might come across as jagged and spiteful, not mellow and sympathetic, but my obligation is to what is true, not what sounds sweet but false.
As to where I will go after I die, I am the child of the universe, an embodiment of some energy. When the life-force that holds my being together weakens, and it cannot fend off the forces of atrophy and disintegration, the compound being that is me will be broken to simpler elements in order to be recombined into other forms and embodiments of energy. I never once in my life, after I turned 11 years of age, entertain a notion, a fairly tale belief that I will go to "Heaven" or will be reincarnated as another human being (as the Tibetan Buddhists are fond of believing) or as another organism after I die. Surely the chemical elements that used to make up an entity called Wissai are now recycled into forming other embodiments of energy, but the consciousness-- the soul, if you will- that used to be mine is gone once my body breaks down into simpler elements. Any talk which says that if I behave in this current life, I will be rewarded by coming back on this planet earth as a (better) human being and if I don't behave, I will be punished to reincarnate as lower forms of life, is a crude scheme of reward and punishment to ensure moral behavior is practiced. It is no different from the visions of physical heaven and hell in Christian and Islamic faiths. I am too sophisticated a thinker and too informed a reader to believe in such nonsense.
Very few men have many original ideas, ideas that they come up largely by themselves and from which they view themselves and the world. Most of us, if we are lucky, have one or two. And we work on them constantly, repeating and refining them. That makes cowards cum hypocrites who don't have a single idea of their own tartly and pointedly complain that we sound like a broken record. They think that by making fun of us, they get a satisfaction that they show their displeasure and contempt. Little do they know that they sow their own self-destruction. Humans have long memories for hurtful feelings and very limited capacity for forgiveness. They instinctively thirst for vengeance, for exacting justice, for punishing those who dared to be insolent to them. That's why wise men throughout the ages have counseled us to be circumspect with our words for they can cause mayhem and bloodshed. But fools like me, because of inflated ego, don't give a damn about the advice and thus manage to irritate and infuriate almost everybody. Take the case of the existence of God as a personhood, most humans subscribe to this notion. I wonder if they embrace the notion out of personal contemplation and conviction or simply out of mindless acceptance of socialization and indoctrination.
Jews were credited with inventing monotheism. But I suppose other peoples in the world are also capable of conceiving a single God, the top dog, the Supreme Being who rules the universe. Such a notion is not hard to come up with although polytheism was more common with humans in ancient times. But seriously folks, do you really believe that Moses found The Ten Commandments from God in Mt Sinai, that Jesus was Son of God, that Muhammad was the last prophet on earth, and that Buddha was right when he talked about eternal reoccurrence and reincarnation? I have not met personally Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and Siddhartha so I only go by what others have said about them. The only thing I found credible and common about these gentlemen was that they all stressed love and charity, although Jesus and Muhammad were also quoted of speaking passionately about vengeance and punishment. I regarded these founders of religion as mere men and had no divine connection none whatsoever simply because to my way of thinking there is no divinity to begin with. What we have are manifestations of energy and a vast ignorance of why the Big Bang occurred. Any talk about God as a personhood to whom humans can pray to and ask for help smacks of human sophistry and self-deception. True humans always go for honesty and dignity. There is no need to rely on a fiction in order to gain strength.
But enough bellyaching about metaphysics or mention of scumbags and sordid beings. I write in order to get off steam, and not to look for admirers with whom I can snicker at the world, neither do I write in order to search for a pocket mirror and studio audience. What I search for when I write is myself because sometimes in the process of stringing words together I recognize that I am not the only thing of beauty in this world and that there is burnished teak as well as alabaster, rippling mahogany as well as smooth, soothing silk. I write because I like to hack through a thorn forest. I want to emerge from it bloodied but defiant and unbowed. And when I do, I would give off a blood-curdling scream to startle the sleeping simians and docile sheep in the valley down below. I might come across as jagged and spiteful, not mellow and sympathetic, but my obligation is to what is true, not what sounds sweet but false.
As to where I will go after I die, I am the child of the universe, an embodiment of some energy. When the life-force that holds my being together weakens, and it cannot fend off the forces of atrophy and disintegration, the compound being that is me will be broken to simpler elements in order to be recombined into other forms and embodiments of energy. I never once in my life, after I turned 11 years of age, entertain a notion, a fairly tale belief that I will go to "Heaven" or will be reincarnated as another human being (as the Tibetan Buddhists are fond of believing) or as another organism after I die. Surely the chemical elements that used to make up an entity called Wissai are now recycled into forming other embodiments of energy, but the consciousness-- the soul, if you will- that used to be mine is gone once my body breaks down into simpler elements. Any talk which says that if I behave in this current life, I will be rewarded by coming back on this planet earth as a (better) human being and if I don't behave, I will be punished to reincarnate as lower forms of life, is a crude scheme of reward and punishment to ensure moral behavior is practiced. It is no different from the visions of physical heaven and hell in Christian and Islamic faiths. I am too sophisticated a thinker and too informed a reader to believe in such nonsense.
Music in the night
You are attracted to the night. That's when you do your best thinking, have wild ideas, grow restless, and are bowled over by music. A saxophone wails in the night. A lovely lilting voice sings about love or loneliness. The fingers over the piano create a cascading melody of exquisite feelings. The violin lingers on, lengthens on a sensation. And when all these sounds blend and meld together into a symphony, a harmonious vibration, you experience ecstasy, peace, culture, and civilization. Your soul trembles. Your body rocks. Your heart leaps with joy at one moment and then another song comes on, your heart breaks into thousand pieces with sorrows.
Sounds travel far in the desert at night. A train rumbles on iron wheels, making a soothing percussion from the distance. You lie in bed, listening to the music and to all the sounds. Your bedroom window is open. Cool desert air is filling the room. You feel alive. The thought of suicide seems silly and weak and absurd. Life is worth living. Life is sound, music, of vibration and of fighting to the end.
Wissai
Sounds travel far in the desert at night. A train rumbles on iron wheels, making a soothing percussion from the distance. You lie in bed, listening to the music and to all the sounds. Your bedroom window is open. Cool desert air is filling the room. You feel alive. The thought of suicide seems silly and weak and absurd. Life is worth living. Life is sound, music, of vibration and of fighting to the end.
Wissai
Jovian Fantasies
Dark clouds are gathering once again in the desert. They are a welcome sight because they only venture this far into the interior a few times a year. Temperature drops. All living things feel good and expecting and are eager for life-sustaining rains. There's a sense of joyous anticipation in the air, a crackling electricity coursing through the environment or at least that's how you feel or think you feel. Reality is all perception. You are aware of that, especially as far as simpletons are concerned because they foolishly think what they believe in are absolute truths, instead of merely their mental constructs. They don't know what absolute truths are if the truths hit them over the head because they either lack sufficient gray matter or they are full of fears and wishful thinking. You are different from them. You know that and most of the time you don't bother to hide that fact from them. There's an unresolved anger inside you. You have tried hard to keep it under control. It has been your biggest enemy.
It's now seven in the evening. Rains have not arrived yet, just the air laden with moisture. A loneliness tries to climb onto you. You kick it away, but it is persistent. It keeps jumping back to the bed. Finally you let it curl up next to your heart, heavy and warm and purring like a baby in dreams. You are rereading a letter from her, a precocious 17-year-old girl finishing her master's thesis on John Keats:
Dear Heart
How have you been doing? I hope your cold is gone by now. At your age, you must take better care of yourself, please. Stop putting your body and mind through such a punishing regimen.
The thesis is almost over. Now I'm wondering what I'm going to do with it. Teaching is an obvious choice, but I'm not sure it will be my calling. I'm not keen on going on for a doctorate. I want to write, but have serious doubts about how wide my readership would be and thus success.
My roommate is heavy into sex these days. That's all what she talks about. She rhapsodizes about the size and the configuration of the member of her boyfriend and the prismatic catalogue of his erotic experience. She is into onanistic practices and fantasies. She imagines enormous organs; she's having congress with horses, bulls, elephants, camels, and giraffes. She is positively Jovian in her imagination.
All her talks about sex and outrageous fantasies have had an impact on me. Honey, are you aware we have had only 11 encounters in toto, and the last two you had to resort to manual manipulation? Please consider asking your doctor for Viagra or Cialis. I know you are a proud and stubborn man, but please be considerate of my passion for you and my youth.
Anyway, while my roommate ponders and pines for the configuration of the member of her boyfriend, I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at exactly the opposite wavelength, so that eventually I will exist on between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable (does all these make sense to you? I copied them down from a book about quantum mechanics since I liked the sound of them). One day, I will walk right through the walls of your house, kidnap you from the prison built by Laura, and make you permanently mine.
Your girl,
Judy
It's now seven in the evening. Rains have not arrived yet, just the air laden with moisture. A loneliness tries to climb onto you. You kick it away, but it is persistent. It keeps jumping back to the bed. Finally you let it curl up next to your heart, heavy and warm and purring like a baby in dreams. You are rereading a letter from her, a precocious 17-year-old girl finishing her master's thesis on John Keats:
Dear Heart
How have you been doing? I hope your cold is gone by now. At your age, you must take better care of yourself, please. Stop putting your body and mind through such a punishing regimen.
The thesis is almost over. Now I'm wondering what I'm going to do with it. Teaching is an obvious choice, but I'm not sure it will be my calling. I'm not keen on going on for a doctorate. I want to write, but have serious doubts about how wide my readership would be and thus success.
My roommate is heavy into sex these days. That's all what she talks about. She rhapsodizes about the size and the configuration of the member of her boyfriend and the prismatic catalogue of his erotic experience. She is into onanistic practices and fantasies. She imagines enormous organs; she's having congress with horses, bulls, elephants, camels, and giraffes. She is positively Jovian in her imagination.
All her talks about sex and outrageous fantasies have had an impact on me. Honey, are you aware we have had only 11 encounters in toto, and the last two you had to resort to manual manipulation? Please consider asking your doctor for Viagra or Cialis. I know you are a proud and stubborn man, but please be considerate of my passion for you and my youth.
Anyway, while my roommate ponders and pines for the configuration of the member of her boyfriend, I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at exactly the opposite wavelength, so that eventually I will exist on between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable (does all these make sense to you? I copied them down from a book about quantum mechanics since I liked the sound of them). One day, I will walk right through the walls of your house, kidnap you from the prison built by Laura, and make you permanently mine.
Your girl,
Judy
Who are we?
Who are we?
Who we are is what we think we are, not what we really are. It only matters when the discrepancy between who we think we are and who we really are no longer sustains itself and crumbles right in front of our eyes. Only then we are forced to confront reality and accept who really are. Very few humans are able to accept who they are. Most often fantasize they are better than they really are.
Take the matter of patriotism. Most Viet expats would vehemently claim that they care and love Vietnam, but when you inquire and probe a little more deeply as to what they have done to support their claim, you would then encounter excuses and rationalizations.
Take another intimate matter, say, love and sexuality. Most would claim that they were or still are attractive to the opposite sex, but few offer hard evidence. Most would assert that they are still virile, but quietly rely on sex-enhancing drugs for performance. Sadly there has been a plethora of essays or poems about sexual matters, but a dearth of essays and poems about love, duty, and responsibility. As men get closer to death, there is a marked preoccupation with frivolity and little concern with meaning and purpose of life and with honor and marital vows.
Last Sunday, you went to Scottsdale to ply your trade at the avocation of poker. You saw your friend Mike from
Ethiopia talking with an attractive but provocatively clad young woman. Later you came over and asked who the woman was. Mike said she was only a friend. He explained that the evening before, he was playing at the slot machine, the woman played at the machine next to him. She went broke and pathetically asked him if she would "borrow" two dollars from him. Mike gave her $5 and said that it was a gift. Then he went home. The following day she was looking for Mike and found him taking a break smoking cigarette outside the poker room. That was when you saw them talking. It turned out that she managed to turn that $5 gift to $200 win. And she was looking for Mike to give him $100! You were astounded to hear that. You were then completely bowled over by Mike's revelation that Mike refused to take the $100 and told her that she needed to manage her money better. The woman was swept off her feet by Mike's magnanimous gesture. She embraced Mike and told Mike they could go out to have dinner together and later to have "a good time". Mike, aged 36, thanked her but said that he was married and he didn't want to betray his wife. Now, please bear in mind that the woman was young and very attractive, and thus rendered the story told by Mike incredibly beautiful and rare. You wonder how many people in this world would behave like the young woman and Mike. Mike was not rich by any means. He made only $50,000 a year and was not a very successful poker player and could use the $100. Mike told her that she was indeed a very rare person. She replied that he was very rare himself.
After hearing the story from Mike, you couldn't help thinking about it and felt compelled to disseminate it. You also realized that life was stranger than fiction and that there were some rare, beautiful people in this world who made you feel small and ugly. You then vouched to yourself to be who you could be. Starting that Sunday afternoon, you would stop feeling and acting superior to those who don't share your views on life and who don't seem to possess the same bookish knowledge or the same reasoning skills or the same morality as you do. You would have to mind your own business and work on improving yourself.
Wissai
October 20, 2010
Who we are is what we think we are, not what we really are. It only matters when the discrepancy between who we think we are and who we really are no longer sustains itself and crumbles right in front of our eyes. Only then we are forced to confront reality and accept who really are. Very few humans are able to accept who they are. Most often fantasize they are better than they really are.
Take the matter of patriotism. Most Viet expats would vehemently claim that they care and love Vietnam, but when you inquire and probe a little more deeply as to what they have done to support their claim, you would then encounter excuses and rationalizations.
Take another intimate matter, say, love and sexuality. Most would claim that they were or still are attractive to the opposite sex, but few offer hard evidence. Most would assert that they are still virile, but quietly rely on sex-enhancing drugs for performance. Sadly there has been a plethora of essays or poems about sexual matters, but a dearth of essays and poems about love, duty, and responsibility. As men get closer to death, there is a marked preoccupation with frivolity and little concern with meaning and purpose of life and with honor and marital vows.
Last Sunday, you went to Scottsdale to ply your trade at the avocation of poker. You saw your friend Mike from
Ethiopia talking with an attractive but provocatively clad young woman. Later you came over and asked who the woman was. Mike said she was only a friend. He explained that the evening before, he was playing at the slot machine, the woman played at the machine next to him. She went broke and pathetically asked him if she would "borrow" two dollars from him. Mike gave her $5 and said that it was a gift. Then he went home. The following day she was looking for Mike and found him taking a break smoking cigarette outside the poker room. That was when you saw them talking. It turned out that she managed to turn that $5 gift to $200 win. And she was looking for Mike to give him $100! You were astounded to hear that. You were then completely bowled over by Mike's revelation that Mike refused to take the $100 and told her that she needed to manage her money better. The woman was swept off her feet by Mike's magnanimous gesture. She embraced Mike and told Mike they could go out to have dinner together and later to have "a good time". Mike, aged 36, thanked her but said that he was married and he didn't want to betray his wife. Now, please bear in mind that the woman was young and very attractive, and thus rendered the story told by Mike incredibly beautiful and rare. You wonder how many people in this world would behave like the young woman and Mike. Mike was not rich by any means. He made only $50,000 a year and was not a very successful poker player and could use the $100. Mike told her that she was indeed a very rare person. She replied that he was very rare himself.
After hearing the story from Mike, you couldn't help thinking about it and felt compelled to disseminate it. You also realized that life was stranger than fiction and that there were some rare, beautiful people in this world who made you feel small and ugly. You then vouched to yourself to be who you could be. Starting that Sunday afternoon, you would stop feeling and acting superior to those who don't share your views on life and who don't seem to possess the same bookish knowledge or the same reasoning skills or the same morality as you do. You would have to mind your own business and work on improving yourself.
Wissai
October 20, 2010
What do we get from reading?
Words you encountered and modified and added on the way to dusty death:
We read in order to learn about the world, about others and about ourselves in that world of ours. We want to get informed. We also want to get "entertained". We read stories so we can remember our moral education learned during childhood and later about the movements of the heart. We soar with the language. The stories get hold of us and give us hope and strength. They remind us that people who are hurt and vulnerable can also be feisty and resourceful and ultimately become in their own ways the owners of their fates, notwithstanding the observations of some of us who have not been able to put ourselves in their shoes.
You are reading two books that argue that there's a non-materialistic basis for God. You want to know how the opposing camp thinks. You want to keep an open mind. As a writer wannabe, you must learn to live comfortably with irony and paradox and inconsistency and contradiction, and to be able to render that in a story spacious enough to allow for ambiguity, rather than feeling the need to resolve it through pronouncements. Art is evocation, not exhortation.
We read so we can grapple with the issue of power which manifests itself in all aspects of human society. Power is intimately linked with control of resources and how and what to think and thus survival itself. You instinctively resent power because you love independence and have confidence of who you are and the powers of your brain. You sometimes can't help but evince contempt and arrogance for ignoramuses and cowards because you are angry, but you are now more conscious of the emotional dynamics at work and hence keep things in check and perspective. The meaning of any human action, especially yours, can only be understood by putting it in a context and in a broader pattern. But in the end our ability to understand others is limited by our ability to understand ourselves and our imagination. Humans simply cannot understand the unfamiliar. Thus, almost all comments, criticisms, and interpretations are expressions of self-projection. One way to understand a person is to make him angry, for in anger we often reveal our true self. We let others see our emotional makeup without the normal interference of the higher neocortex. Very often we show to the world we are men made of clay, unbaked and unhardened. One hard rain---a few chosen biting words of comment---will reduce us to a lump of melting, crumbling, and pathetic being, a slave of emotions, instead of a dignified, stoic, wise man who tried to show to the world before with our sagacious advice and bon mots. You used to be like a sword cutting through the hypocrisy and falsehood, exposing the raw cowardice masqueraded as a desire for peace and quiet. You demanded other humans live a life of authenticity and responsibility, not rampant selfishness. You made them uncomfortable. You got into their faces, itching for a debate. Nobody wanted to debate with you because it was hard to debate against truth and reason and responsibility. You were the voice of truth and reason and responsibility. You sounded superior because you were superior. An asshole wondered out loud of who the hell you thought you were by asking other humans living up to their potential. By asking such a stupid question in a peevish, crude, and rude manner, the asshole revealed to the world its true color, that it was a true, stinking asshole, afraid and unwilling to live up to the pious advice it had dispensed to the world. It could not walk the talk. One simple test and it failed miserably. It showed to the world that it was weak and undisciplined. All fat men are weak and undisciplined. It earned your eternal contempt, disdain, and scorn. From that moment on, you have regarded it as a piece of stinking dogshit lying on a sidewalk that every man, woman, and child all want to avoid contact. One stupid outburst and it revealed itself. It didn't know one simple rule of human communication: by showing contempt to others in a vile, profane, crude manner, it ironically earned and got the disrespect and disdain it wished to inflict on its target. Its two predecessors didn't fare much better, but at least they managed to avoid using the profane language. Hypocrisy is a sign of moral weakness. Failure to apologize is an indication of gross sensibilities, a failure to know the difference between right and wrong. All three assholes are prime examples of hypocrisy and moral cowardice. Your words are tough and demanding. Your questions are not idle; they go to the core of being, of asking who we really are, and what we are here for on this planet, for what purpose and for what meaning?
Wissai
We read in order to learn about the world, about others and about ourselves in that world of ours. We want to get informed. We also want to get "entertained". We read stories so we can remember our moral education learned during childhood and later about the movements of the heart. We soar with the language. The stories get hold of us and give us hope and strength. They remind us that people who are hurt and vulnerable can also be feisty and resourceful and ultimately become in their own ways the owners of their fates, notwithstanding the observations of some of us who have not been able to put ourselves in their shoes.
You are reading two books that argue that there's a non-materialistic basis for God. You want to know how the opposing camp thinks. You want to keep an open mind. As a writer wannabe, you must learn to live comfortably with irony and paradox and inconsistency and contradiction, and to be able to render that in a story spacious enough to allow for ambiguity, rather than feeling the need to resolve it through pronouncements. Art is evocation, not exhortation.
We read so we can grapple with the issue of power which manifests itself in all aspects of human society. Power is intimately linked with control of resources and how and what to think and thus survival itself. You instinctively resent power because you love independence and have confidence of who you are and the powers of your brain. You sometimes can't help but evince contempt and arrogance for ignoramuses and cowards because you are angry, but you are now more conscious of the emotional dynamics at work and hence keep things in check and perspective. The meaning of any human action, especially yours, can only be understood by putting it in a context and in a broader pattern. But in the end our ability to understand others is limited by our ability to understand ourselves and our imagination. Humans simply cannot understand the unfamiliar. Thus, almost all comments, criticisms, and interpretations are expressions of self-projection. One way to understand a person is to make him angry, for in anger we often reveal our true self. We let others see our emotional makeup without the normal interference of the higher neocortex. Very often we show to the world we are men made of clay, unbaked and unhardened. One hard rain---a few chosen biting words of comment---will reduce us to a lump of melting, crumbling, and pathetic being, a slave of emotions, instead of a dignified, stoic, wise man who tried to show to the world before with our sagacious advice and bon mots. You used to be like a sword cutting through the hypocrisy and falsehood, exposing the raw cowardice masqueraded as a desire for peace and quiet. You demanded other humans live a life of authenticity and responsibility, not rampant selfishness. You made them uncomfortable. You got into their faces, itching for a debate. Nobody wanted to debate with you because it was hard to debate against truth and reason and responsibility. You were the voice of truth and reason and responsibility. You sounded superior because you were superior. An asshole wondered out loud of who the hell you thought you were by asking other humans living up to their potential. By asking such a stupid question in a peevish, crude, and rude manner, the asshole revealed to the world its true color, that it was a true, stinking asshole, afraid and unwilling to live up to the pious advice it had dispensed to the world. It could not walk the talk. One simple test and it failed miserably. It showed to the world that it was weak and undisciplined. All fat men are weak and undisciplined. It earned your eternal contempt, disdain, and scorn. From that moment on, you have regarded it as a piece of stinking dogshit lying on a sidewalk that every man, woman, and child all want to avoid contact. One stupid outburst and it revealed itself. It didn't know one simple rule of human communication: by showing contempt to others in a vile, profane, crude manner, it ironically earned and got the disrespect and disdain it wished to inflict on its target. Its two predecessors didn't fare much better, but at least they managed to avoid using the profane language. Hypocrisy is a sign of moral weakness. Failure to apologize is an indication of gross sensibilities, a failure to know the difference between right and wrong. All three assholes are prime examples of hypocrisy and moral cowardice. Your words are tough and demanding. Your questions are not idle; they go to the core of being, of asking who we really are, and what we are here for on this planet, for what purpose and for what meaning?
Wissai
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