What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness. Faith in the people you adore doesn’t disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear.

I wanted to slap the girl in the mirror. I wanted to kiss her, too. It was all very confusing.

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment, seeking some sort of equilibrium.

Today lives in the shadow of tomorrow. And the shape of that shadow is circumscribed entirely by your willingness to hope.

I believe that civilization’s path is a pendulum that swings both ways, vacillating between hope and despair, success and failure, and all we can do is hang on for dear life. Because it will never, ever stop.