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Holding the Inner Flame
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It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
To be a naive idealist is, I daresay, the prerogative of the very young or the incurably romantic — those sweetly blinded by the pastel fogs of first truths. To be a cynical realist is, in turn, the privilege of the prematurely embalmed — those gray-souled scribblers who sip vinegar with their morning tea and scoff at stars. But to wander, stripped of illusions, in that splendid, godless twilight of clear sight — and yet preserve the flicker, the moth-winged flame of wonder! — ah, that is art, that is grace, that is the trembling tightrope between despair and delight.
For what else is a writer but a firefly in the dark, both hopelessly aware of the void and insistently incandescent? The poet sees the abyss and hums a lullaby to it. The child, once betrayed by reality, yet chooses — inexplicably, gloriously — to believe again. Such is not folly. It is a most exquisite defiance.
So let us sip the wine of clarity, but let us not extinguish the lamp of beauty. Let us know the rot and yet revere the rose. Illusions may fall, but style remains. And somewhere, beneath the careful ruin of our understanding, the inner flame — flickering, trembling, immortal — dances on.
