Quick Thought

In reading a conversation between (Johnathan) Franzen and (Alice) Sebold mentioned in the New York Times, she mentioned "getting down in the pit and loving someone," to which Franzen describes as " We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.............She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard." I used to pray for clean slates, the falsified amygdala inside the limbic system that is my mystery.

Going back to America's greatest living novelist:

"The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self."

Preparation is fallacy. Risk is everything. Much like the depth beyond the singles of your grandparents music collection, memory is the scapegoat expediting present criticism. Hell, even drake wisdom is valid: You never see it coming, only see it go away. Being present is perhaps the hardest lesson I've ever learned. I've tried to pass it on but I think it has to click on their own.

Final Trip to Franzen:

"But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking. And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency.

......the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it."

So when I tell you I love you. I'm living. Embrace that so I can cheat death.