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Anyway, I’m not writing this for money. I am writing it to save my sanity and to discover if I can convince myself that my life has purpose and meaning enough to justify continued existence.
Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.
You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you’ll do next.
We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which it must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness, and misery.
Unlike the beasts of the wild, the many cruel varieties of human monsters, when at last cornered, seldom fight with greater ferocity. Instead, they reveal the cowardice at the core of their brutality.
Furthermore, I admit to a tendency, sometimes regrettable, to surrender always to my curiosity.
When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.
“Why’re you afraid of guns?” she persisted. “I was probably shot to death in a past life.” “You don’t believe in reincarnation.” “I don’t believe in taxes, either, but I pay them.”
A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
I am an optimist about our species. I assume God is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over. Yet I can’t entirely dismiss that cynic’s sour assessment. I harbor a capacity for inhumanity, glimpsed in my cruel retort to the person I love most in all the world.
“because you won’t find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.”
Even by indirection and chance, however, decapitation can ruin your day.
Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.
