John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

When did you give up and decide you had enough?
In the last five years of your life what have you done?¹

This is the question that comes to mind everyday about so many people I meet. Perhaps the feeling of worry about the aimlessness of so many lives is so strong because there was a sense in which I gave up for many years.

1. Boy Sets Fire : The Misery Index – Notes From The Plague Years : Social Register Fanclub↩

The idea of someone else ever knowing me like you do disgusts me.

Of all the beautiful words ever said to me that were later proven false, the most painful are those words — because I would still assume words like those spoken to me now to be sincere. Why? (Fortasse requiris.) Because when one willfully deceives (unless one is a remarkably accomplished liar), one is positive and does not use phrases like “disgusts me”. Also because such indignation and repulsion seems trustworthy to me — far more trustworthy than theoretical ethical convictions. I trust those whose natures seem instinctively moral rather than those who seem to have learned it as a conscious habit — and disgust is an emotion I associate with moral natures, with those who have the habit of seeing things as beneath them. (Hence moral natures are arrogant natures in the eyes of many — and not merely in their eyes.) Indeed, disgust might be the primary emotion I associate with the moral — even though I have reached an age where I am disgusted with disgust.

Those words came to mind while watching our bass player, Scotty, scratch his back on a doorframe the other day. At the moment, I thought that real intimacy is the point where you felt comfortable having someone scratch your back for you. I think now that such intimacy does not come to some people ever — perhaps to most people even.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.¹

Every year that passes makes me view Lord Byron more positively. I still cannot evade the sense that he was an untrustworthy man, but he was a brilliant writer.

1. Lord Byron↩

Those who do not frequently see through things have never seen at all.

Do you really believe or is it just what you have been told?¹

The intention behind these words I share, but in practice those who have merely been told what to believe are the very people who believe the most. The problem is not the source of one’s beliefs, but belief itself.

Of course, in too many the dangers of belief are replaced by the dangers of lacking all conviction. To do a thing intensely is not an error, but a virtue (perhaps virtu itself as Machiavelli would have said) — but one must be very careful about what one does intensely.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.²

1. Bane : The Note : Wasted On The Young↩
2. William Butler Yeats : The Second Coming↩

Love and weapons kill much the same way.¹

True, though it depends on what stage of love and which weapon you’re comparing. Falling in love is rather like a shotgun blast to the skull: quick, complete and irreversible. Falling out of love is, in contrast, like being stabbed in the stomach and left to die slowly of bloodloss.

1. Boy Sets Fire : The Misery Index – Notes From The Plague Years : Falling Out Theme↩

By itself, one day spent watching snow fall makes life worth living. The snow supercedes everything: the soul-killing busy work of modern business, the vain, continual searching for new and exotic pleasures; the thousands heartaches that flesh is heir to. All one needs is white flakes swirling, falling and rising against the background of green trees and blue rivers.

Everything about the words “final solution” is evil.