Balancing the Madness

I have been trying to read for pleasure in an attempt to balance the madness that is right now.  

I am keeping to essays and poetry, both of which, like TVDs as opposed to movies, are much less of a time commitment, as time is a commodity right now.

From The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy

          excerpt taken from "The End of Imagination"

"To love.  To be loved.  To never forget your own insignificance.  To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you.  To seek joy in the saddest of places.  To pursue beauty to its lair.  To never simplify what is complicated and never complicate what is simple.  To respect strength, never power.  Above all, to watch.  To try and understand.  To never look away.  And never, never, to forget." 

[on living while you are alive]

From Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen

"What is a saint?"

"What is a saint?  A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.  It is impossible to say what that possibility is.  I think it has something to do with the energy of love.  Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.  A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago.  I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.  It is a kind of balance that is his glory.  He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.  His course is a caress of the hill.  His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance.  Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid body landscape.  His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.  He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.  It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

These thoughts help me to realize that my driving passion is love.  Those who do not understand my pursuits in life, who write me off as a hippy wanting to study trivial matters, who think it strange that I want to better understand human beings and the effects of history on us and the ways in which we will affect the history that has yet to come, are not guided by the same passions.  I will try to love and understand those people as well, as they are human beings just as I am.