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If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration.
Solitude and peace* with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.
**I believe that such peace can only be found in knowing God and His grace.**
I had been in the midst of Katrina and its aftermath. . . . There is a purity in catastrophe. We see firsthand the nature of both human courage and human frailty, the destructive and arbitrary power of the elements, the breakdown of social restraint and our mechanical inventions and the release of the savage that hides in the collective unconscious. An emergency room lit only by flashlights and filled with the moans of the dying and feet sloshing in water becomes a medieval scene no different than one penned by Victor Hugo. It is under these circumstances that we discover who we are, for good or bad. And when all this passes, we never talk about it, lest we lose the insight it gave us. Wars have the same attraction. Rhetoric fades away; truth remains.
. . . have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life.
Sleep is a mercurial mistress. She caresses and absolves and gives light and rest to the soul in our darkest hours. Or she fills us with fear and doubt and disjointed images that seem dredged out of the Abyss.
