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May 21 - May 30, 2022
“solving the problem” of gender, which is really just the problem of femininity
if you are peering into another person’s soul, you are looking in the wrong direction.
Coleridge understood that the interplay between human consciousness and nature was in fact an interplay of nature with itself. Living and dying, we are part of the eternal system of life and death. We are the part that knows itself.
When consciousness knows nature truly, it discovers something beyond nature, something supernatural.
Because our lives are stories—works of art—art is practice for love. It is practice in including other stories, good and evil, within our own story. This is why I think Shakespeare, while not a Christian writer per se, is the most Christian writer. He “has as much delight in conceiving an [evil] Iago as a [lovable] Imogen,” as Keats put it.72 He shines his light on the good and the bad, the just and the unjust alike.
It is not that Christ is who we should be. It is that he became what we are trying to become.
In relationships, as in sports, you have to realign your body with the reality of its true meaning.
Learn to experience lust and rage—fear and anxiety and envy—as a shot wide of the mark of true meaning—hamartia. Aim the flesh toward its telos: be perfect.
I hear people say that Christianity is cheap virtue because it threatens you with hell if you are bad and promises heaven if you are good. The people who say this are no doubt good because of the sheer angelic sweetness of their natures. Or something. But it is not a threat to say: If you don’t exercise, you will be flabby. If you don’t read, you will be ignorant. This is just the way things are. If your life expresses your soul, the idea of you in the mind of God, then that is how you will live in the mind of God forever. If your life expresses another idea that lives elsewhere, you will live
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The Sermon on the Mount is not a philosophy. It is Jesus telling you what he sees: the way things truly are.
Tragedy is an inevitable conflict of imperatives. It is what happens when a person does what he must do, right or wrong, and, right or wrong, must suffer for what he does.
Once the machinery is set in motion, there is no stopping it. To live is to die. To love is to grieve. To think is to suffer. To speak the truth is to set yourself at daggers drawn with the world.
When your cross looms in front of you, it won’t be enough to “act as if there were a God.” You will have to believe, or you will crater.
In the end, everything becomes literature. Whatever is not forgotten must be told. Whatever is told unfolds itself in time. Whatever unfolds in time becomes a story.
In the end, life becomes literature, and literature has meaning because life has meaning.
If what he said was true, then no honest heart can deny him.
