“Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
The Stoic accepts suffering.
The Existentialist embraces suffering.
Siddhartha: "Suffering has no significance."
It was on one of those rare days of full immersion in society, strolling down mid-afternoon streets brimming with pumpkin spice latte- and paper shopping bag-carrying patrons, that Schopenhauer's snarky face hit me like a truck.
What little value I would have created in an otherwise socially accepted constructive day job suddenly seemed but a vapid catechism. It is simple to be content when one is physically disconnected from the world. It is only when walking among one's fellow humans that The Loneliness emerges. Roaming from one observational deck to another, this axiomatic misery feels like an anthropological joke.
I had put off reading The Fountainhead until Roark's Noble Struggle seemed trivial. Its flat characters and dry prose imparted upon me that the indisputably noble thing to do Today is to become a high school philosophy teacher, a foundation builder of critical thinking and metaphysical frameworks. Afterthought: but what's the point? What is the goddamned point?
Vonnegut’s words always make my eyes want to swell up with tears. “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow.”
“For heaven’s sake.” one wants to cry aloud, “Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
Glass palace on the shore. Waves frozen in time.