reflections & fragments (VIII)

Hold a mirror up to a man’s face and he’ll love you for it. Hold it up to his soul, and he’ll despise you.

Compulsion can only happen under the spell of a morally induced repression.

That is why identities built on rigid moral codes become enslaved by the very compulsions they condemn.

The lustful Christian. The angry hippie. The secretly gay conservative. The bigoted liberal…

People will reveal everything about themselves if you simply listen: to what they hate, what they over-criticize.

We are trying to cleanse something in ourselves that cannot be cleansed.

It’s easier to see the devil in the world than in the mirror.

Tolerance for rejection — even perceived rejection — is the greatest determinant of whether a person fulfills their potential or shrinks into mediocrity.

In New York City, I meet many people acting out a posture of irony who I sense are deeply sincere but too self-aware to risk appearing self-serious or naive. There is always an insecurity beneath their gestures. A visceral sadness.

“Let me just be sincere for a moment,” or “If I can be earnest real quick,” are hedges I often hear that repel me. They betray a lack of ownership.

There is nothing more dull than those who always take themselves too seriously and those who never take themselves seriously enough.

Curiosity is not always a virtue. Some doors are better left unopened, especially when what lies behind them has the potential to do spiritual harm.

I’ve found it increasingly vital to keep one foot outside of intellectual communities —to walk among those who haven’t lost the thread of life, who haven’t surrendered themselves to constant analysis and abstract logic: people I both envy and pity.

We exist in a landscape where everyone is trying to force their individuality onto one another in pathetic attempts to validate the persona’s existence. We are living through an existential crisis in which aesthetic identity — the “persona” — is mistaken for the self. When these constructed identities come under attack, it feels as if our very lives were under threat. The result is hysteria, reactivity, insecurity.

Many people have vision. Vision alone is not a unique trait. Plenty others possess form. They are everywhere you look. What is rare, however, are those who contain both. Vision is immaterial without form, and form is meaningless without vision. Even Christ the visionary needed Peter the builder. Nothing survives on revelation alone.

Movements are justified by art, not by rhetoric about art. It is far easier to promise transformation than to produce something transformative. If a renaissance is real, it will be evident in the art itself — not in its marketing, nor in its war against imagined enemies.

The irony of America is that it is by far the most philistinic country in the West — especially from a literary perspective — yet more stories and characters are woven into the fabric of its land than anywhere else on earth.

We cannot resurrect literature by reenacting older forms, or by positioning ourselves against contemporary archetypes. The conditions have changed. Literature cannot compete with mass media at scale — and that is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity for it to become more inward, more exacting, more transformative.

Willful naivety is the practice of playful ignorance: the decision to lose yourself in an emotion without analyzing it.

The definition of evil is the total eclipse of the self into the shadow, past the threshold of no return. It is an internal force externalized. Not the other way around. The external can only mirror the inner world.

Many intellectuals wear cynicism as a badge of honor, but they have not yet grasped the second birth that lies beyond it, and so they despise all who have not yet tasted the fruit of disillusionment.

If man was made in God’s image, then every insult against your fellow man is an insult against God.