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Moral Superiority and Simple Kindness
One of the biggest inflations we can have is a moral superiority. And that is a bubble that needs to be pricked. And the soul doesn’t like its lofty moralistic attitudes as much as it loves its own experiences of ‘depth’. And Heraclitus said that you can never really discover the limits of the soul, no matter how many roads you take, so deep is its mystery’.
— Jon Wilson
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Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul — but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them — but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth…
~Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
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Vows
I feel my failure intensely
as if it were a vital organ
the gods grew from the side of my head.
You can’t cover it with a hat and I no longer
can sleep on that side it’s so tender.
I wasn’t quite faithful enough
to carry this sort of weight up the mountain.
When I took my vows at nineteen
I had no idea that gods were so merciless…
