Beware the man-child
And other cautionary tales
Dear M,
Another barrage of Facebook thoughts for you.
Being worth it.
Rochefoucauld says, We do not despise all those with vices, but we do despise anyone totally devoid of virtues.
Every man is horrible in his own way. The question is never whether you’re perfect. The question is always whether you’re worth it.
Love and folly.
Real history is known only to God. What we know as cause and effect in itself is a caricature. When something — a city, a country, a person — comes together after billions of years from a billion-trillion directions, we name it, claim it, and pretend that it’s “normal”. We give it an origin story which begins in an arbitrary place and doesn't even come close to explaining it.
Then, just as it slips back into the infinite causes which made it, we fall in love with it, and pour our energy into patching it up, building walls around it, soldering here and there, reapplying stucco and glues and sutures and paints, trying to keep it from going back to where it came: a wave drawing back into the sea.
To love is to claim a miracle in time. To live is to lose it.
Like the wind.
God's mind, comprehending the infinite, would take into account every atom, every thought, every breeze, and traffic light, and mood — every time a stray dog causes somebody to step aside. Thus He would do the unthinkable: to show up to “random” Jews at a tiny inn in the middle of the Roman Empire. He would never "make sense,” or tell us what seems to make sense. He would tell us what, in the infinite collision of happenstances, would have the most beautiful effect. We will never know why He tells us to do anything until we meet Him face-to-face. Then we’ll know how poor our reason really was the whole time: how short-sighted we are; practically blind.
Christ was right: the voice of God could only be like the wind to us, blowing when it wants, and to places we can't tell. The greatest question in Christianity is, when we have that inexplicable urge to act, to give, to bless, whether we heard God’s voice — or our own.
The chain.
I wonder whether Christ commanded us to be meek because the rippling effects of good and evil are too beautiful and terrible, and when we see what we’re actually responsible for, we’ll be sick to our stomachs.
Still, there is a meekness that turns into cowardice. There is an evil which turns into good.
Beware the man-child.
Oscar Wilde said it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. But that's from a man who wrote for a living. For those of us who have to work with our hands, it’s safer to divide men into children and adults — and to do your best to avoid the former.
What is an overgrown child? It's someone who doesn’t know that happiness, like a good night’s sleep, is earned; who thinks life should be free and not bought with toil and sweat and even blood; who won’t admit when he’s gone wrong; who would rather waste and spoil than grow; who would rather consume than create; who always complains, expecting a cosmic mama to pick him up instead of getting up himself; who so believes in himself that he never seeks wisdom; who so believes in others that he thinks strangers — and especially politicians — have the best interests of his family in mind; who believes in romance but not in family; who believes intelligence to lie in having answers and not in posing questions; who believes good intentions and good results are the same thing.
Experts and charmers.
In terms of non-fiction, there are two kinds of readers out there: one a reader of subjects, the other a reader of writers.
A reader of subjects can be classified as a nerd, or an academic: he picks a topic that interests him, and chases it until he finds himself exhausted with it. He becomes “an expert” in whatever field he delves into — and many times an ignoramus in the ones he won't touch.
A reader of writers, on the other hand, is a man of the spirit. He doesn’t care about the topic so much as the wit, the charm, the profundity, the style, and the comedy of a artist. He follows souls instead of subjects, and becomes what is known as "a personality.” In the end he's chasing a new version of himself.
You are more than what you can do.
The things that come out of us when we’re asleep are more interesting than the things that come out of us when we’re awake. Our dreams are racy, scary, funny, moody, weepy — magical and grandiose; exploding with colors, and feelings, and vistas, and music. A dream is never boring. We never had a chance to be to anyone else what we are to ourselves.
This is the appeal of books. An artist drafts a bare outline in words, and we paint up the rest with our dreams. The art of poetry is knowing which words turn our waking into real dreaming. Shakespeare’s stories are borderline irrelevant. His value lies in the means of getting through them.
Robin Hood or a Nigerian Prince.
Comparison isn't just the thief of joy — it’s a thief in general. To steal your joy, compare upward. To steal your pain, compare downward. Not all burglaries are equal.
A vice disguised as a virtue.
Many people were upset last month when RFK, head of Health and Human Services, proposed to find the cause of autism. They said we didn't need to find the cause because we didn’t need to find a cure: that autism wasn’t something to be fixed — it was meant to be worked around, and accepted, and even celebrated as an essential difference.
Compassion is a beautiful thing, but it’s always a human response to pain. Beware of people who would keep you in pain so they can keep showing off their compassion.
Up and down again.
Why do we take compliments so badly — especially the best ones? Because somebody set us a standard and now we’re afraid to fall short of it. A compliment that's too good is the sound of an alarm clock being set. Like with romance, it’s only a matter of time before the mechanics of the universe wake up the dreamer.
We have such a hard time with affection for the same reason. We know that somebody's flown sky high — and that the laws of physics mandate his crash to earth. Affection is most comfortably expressed and received in long-term relationships. Enough ups and downs with anybody over the years and you can enjoy not just the truth of a compliment, as real compliments between spouses are generally given more accurately, but they’ve seen you at your worst, and you know they’ll keep you when you come back down to earth.
Rochefoucauld says
What makes us like new acquaintances is not so much tiredness of the old ones or the pleasure of making a change, as displeasure at not being sufficiently admired by those who know us too well, and the hope of being more admired by those who do not yet know us well enough.
A well-run family is the foundation of real confidence.
Manna in the desert.
Whether it’s peach cobbler, Nirvana, or naked pictures of Claudia Schiffer, man is the only animal who tastes something really great, gets tired of it, and has to move on to something else. We get bored, dissatisfied, and even disgusted with magnificence. Thus we're the only animal forced into creation.
Most great jokes can be told only once without tedium. Led Zeppelin was the first to do what they did and they were treated like gods. Perform Led Zeppelin covers perfectly and you can barely make it out of a dive bar. Make music like Led Zeppelin and even if you make it on to Saturday Night Live, everybody makes fun of you. The first to do something really artistic is a god. The last to do it is a joke.