Secrets To Living

This section is an essay on the secret of living, which can be summed up by a concept called "allow yourself to experience the moment" before consciously reacting. Whatever the life event or situation, positive - negative - or indifferent, concentrate at least briefly on processing the experience and your involuntary internal feelings, rather than judging and reacting to it.

As John Milton said: ""The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

My own advice for those whose lives have been tragic is to sprinkle a few inauthentic details (embellishments) into your narrative. Although very minor to the whole they will soon get bound up in it. But you know they are there and when it begins to overwhelm, you can scorn it all as a bunch of bullshit. I assure you that this works.

If you remember nothing else about author Thomas Wolfe's rather unconventional novels, remember that he used four recurring themes which nicely sum up a person's process of self-discovery. The first theme is "escape" - seeking to go beyond family boundaries to freedom. The second is "search" - looking for a body of beliefs to which one can adhere. The third is time, seeking to define and control time in order to recapture the past. The fourth is "change", unable to achieve permanence because the world is in a constant state of flux.

Together these define a universal longing, and because the longing can never be satisfied in a limited world, Wolfe's novels are colored with the romantic irony of dreams pursued but never possessed.

There are three kinds of jobs. There are good jobs which are engaging, they provide a fair amount of challenge and some intrinsic reward. There are bad jobs which are some combination of boring, dangerous, and generally unpleasant; but still allow you to be true to yourself. Other than any physical danger there is nothing wrong with a bad job as long as it is temporary - but a permanent bad job will eventually turn you into something you are not. And there are jobs that are essentially prostitution; in exchange for pandering to those who hold an advantage, you are rewarded - sometimes richly and sometimes by just getting to keep your job.

Obviously this is a rather simplistic analysis, in reality things are not quite this discrete as some jobs are a blend of two or even all of the three. But even these blended jobs have more characteristics from one of the three types.

"This book is all over the place, but I don't read Camus for coherency. I read Camus to get into a Camusian state of mind, to see things as meaninglessly as he does. Mersault lives for nothing; he appreciates the night and the sea, but knows they're meaningless too. He lives and meets death with open hands, because it too is meaningless, and that only makes his life more free and beautiful. This book was not meant to be published, which allowed Camus to be less organized, but also less reserved, and provides another rare opportunity to glimpse into the ways of the absurd man who is detached from life and lives for nothing, and that is enough to happily fill his heart, at the cost of unrelenting effort to will consciousness and lucidity."

Donald Trump = A Life Engaged In "The Pursuit of Death."

facilis dēscensus Avernō

Definition of facilis descensus Averno

: the descent to Avernus [the underworld] is easy : the road to evil is smooth

A Recent Re-Read of Allingham's "Tiger In The Smoke"

(going to my point about deciding whether to press your advantage)

Micah 6:8

"what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

" What do you know about the Science of Luck? Go on, tell me. You're the only one who's understood at all. Have you ever heard of it before?"

"Not under that name."

"I don't suppose you have. That's my name for it. What's its real name?"

"The Pursuit of Death."

There was a pause. Curiosity, fear, impatience bristled behind Avril. He could feel them.

"It's a known thing, then?"

"You did not discover it, my son."

"No, I suppose not." He was hesitating, a torn and wasted tiger, but still inquisitive. "You've got it right, have you? You have to watch for your chances and then you must never go soft, not once, not for a minute. You mustn't even think soft. Once you're soft, you muck everything, lose your place, and everything goes against you. I've proved it. Keep realistic and you get places fast, everything falls right for you, everything's easy. Is that it?"

"That is it," said Avril humbly. "It is easier to fall downstairs than to climb up. Facilis descensus Averni. That was said a long time ago."

"What are you talking about?"

"The Science of Luck." Avril bent his head. "The staircase has turns, the vine climbs a twisted path, the river runs a winding course. If a man watches he can see the trend and he can go either way."

"Then you know it? Why are you soft?"

"Because I do not want to die. A man who pitches himself down a spiral staircase on which all his fellows are climbing up may injure some of them, but, my dear fellow, it's nothing to the damage he does to himself, is it?"

"You're crazy! You're on to a big thing, you can see what I see, and you won't profit by it."

"Evil, be thou my Good—that is what you have discovered. It is the only sin which cannot be forgiven because when it has finished with you, you are not there to forgive. On your journey you certainly get places. Naturally; you have no opposition. But in the process you die. The man who is with you when you are alone is dying. Fewer things delight him every day. If you attain the world, you cannot give him anything that will please him. In the end there will be no one with you."

"U.S. evangelicals engage Scripture from a hermeneutic of privilege today, which at best fosters a vague comprehension of Christianity. This privileged reading of Scripture allows believers to envision ourselves as the biblical protagonist despite how much more our lives and lifestyles actually resemble the scriptural antagonist. Accordingly, U.S. believers are enabled to exclusively contextualize ourselves as the prophets delivering the words of the Lord as opposed to the people rebuked by the Lord’s prophet due to covenantal unfaithfulness to both God and neighbor."

"Ripple"

Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia.

("Ripple" composed and written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Reproduced by arrangement with Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. (ASCAP))

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung

Would you hear my voice come through the music

Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken

Perhaps they're better left unsung

I don't know, don't really care

Let there be songs to fill the air

(Chorus)