“I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it?”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”
We are a species that is a frantic blur of flesh and concrete. A techno sapien powered by imaginations and passions made real by a hallowed faculty we call reason.
Sometimes I think we live through things only to be able to say that it happened. That it wasn't to someone else, it was to me. Sometimes we live to beat the odds. I'm not crazy even though they thought I was. I live in the same world as everyone else. I just saw more of it, as I'm sure you have. I've seen life after my death, and I'm telling you this because it's the only way to help you have a better life of your own. Sometimes life can only really begin with the knowledge of death. That it can all end, even when you least want it to. The important thing in life is to believe that while you're alive, it's never too late. I promise you, no matter how bad things look, they look better awake than they do asleep. When you die, there's only one thing you want to happen. You wanna come back.
“The unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desires for beauty in human bodies — this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the word for force (rhome) and is called eros.”
“A person who wants to be happy must evidently pursue and practice self-control… This is the target which I think one should look to in living, and in his actions he should direct all of his own affairs and those of his city to the end that justice and self-control will be present in one who is to be blessed. He should not allow his appetites to be undisciplined or undertake to fill them up—that’s interminably bad—and live the life of a marauder. Such a man could not be dear to another man or to a god, for he cannot be a partner, and where there’s no partnership there’s no friendship.”
The Artist takes impure Spirits, and by Sublimation, Nature and Art, cleanseth them into bodies pure and fixed: so that the bodily Nature doth eternally predominate: and being more then perfection to other things.