| Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil. I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth--then shut up. Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers. Submission to God's will is not to be a robot, incapable of choice and thus of sin. Submission can include - DOES include - utter responsibility for the fashion in which I and others shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden or to rend and destroy. A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom. I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it. I used to think I was serving humanity ... and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself. If God existed and if He desired to be worshiped, then it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense that believers offered Him as worship. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness. Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time. No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own ... and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain. Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. All human behavior, all human motivations, all man's hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind's tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction. "Thou art God" - It's not a message of cheer and hope. It's a defiance - and an unafraid, unabashed assumption of personal responsibility. I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe. |
