📚Marginalia

Nothing dries more quickly than a tear.

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

Sometimes people forget to be sympathetic and instead they blame you for everything, even for the things you did when you had no idea they were wrong.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to prove things. even if it turns out that you’re only proving things to yourself.

Fear is worse than death. Death is but the end of life, and I know it well. What I know, I can fight. What can be named, I can endure. But what lies in shadow, I can neither fight nor endure.

We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees.

There comes a point in everybody’s life when you realize the stakes have suddenly changed. The carefree ride of your life slams into a stone wall; all those years of merely bouncing along, life taking you where you want to go, abruptly end.

What you see isn’t always the reality. We look at one thing but see another. Why? With a marble statue because of a change in perspective or trick of light. But with human beings, the reasons are more complex. People project only what they want others to see, or atleast they try to. And even when unintended clues to the being behind the mask are exposed, we often refuse to see them. Our perception of others is always distorted by our own prejudices, hopes, and fears. And sometimes, we look at others and see ourselves.

That’s what it comes down to in the end. You can do what you want to do, or you can do what’s right. And the two aren’t ever quite the same.

History is the story of humanity, filtered by the intelligence of people who have the understanding. And history goes where it wants, Dionysius, like an enormous river that sometimes flows with unstoppable strength, overwhelming everything in its path, and that sometimes advances slowly in lazy spirals waiting to be subdued and controlled by the most mediocre of men. History is a mystery, a mix of passion, horror, hope, enthusiasm, misery. It is both fate and chance, as it is also the product of the iron will of men like you certainly. History is our desire to overcome our own unhappy existence; it is the only monument that will survive us. Even when our temples and our walls have crumbled into ruins, when our gods and our heroes are mere shadows, time-faded images, mutilated and corroded statues, history will remember what we’ve done. The record which survives us is the only immortality that we are granted.