Moderates United

I was listening to some of my Mozart this morning. I had forgotten that a CD I don’t listen to very often had Mozart’s variations on this theme, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, which I found very enjoyable. Like many of you (if anyone is reading this), I had heard somewhere or other that he wrote the theme at an early age, but that appears not to be the case. It is a traditional French melody of unknown provenance, on the theme of which he wrote what sound like jazz-ish improvisations, Koechel 265.

Being me, this led naturally to thinking about Anne Frank’s father in a concentration camp in WW2. I own a documentary on her and her family, and unless my memory is seriously flawed, he spoke of how he and his fellow inmates used to try and recollect melodies by Beethoven, and Brahms and other “classical” composers. I thought about what adult Americans, in similar circumstances, would think about. What beauty could they muster to counter such ugliness? What hymns do we truly own within us? What myths that will sustain us? Only the religious would have a chance at accessing such comforts, in my view. Our culture is so shady, and so fallen. Certainly, obviously, there are positives, but are they the ambient “temperature”?

It seems not.

Edit: I got interrupted before I thought this through. As with all my posts, I may not agree with it tomorrow, and may well be disputing myself an hour from now. This is my “thinking out loud blog”, and that’s the way it works. Some stupidity is inevitable.

I don’t want to leave the impression I think Classical music–the music of the European courts in the time of its composition, and in general of well-to-do elites (who goes to the Orchestra?) today–is somehow the acme of human culture. I don’t believe that. In point of fact, I mainly listen to country music.

What I am trying to express here, poorly, it seems, is a sense that what ties us together is not as sturdy as it once was. The common references seem qualitatively less rich.

This may not be true, but I keep getting in my mind swapping quotes with people from Animal House or Airplane.

Again, things to do. I will likely be back on this post after a while.

Edit two: the concept of a “harmonic” appeared to me. What I think I may decide to use this word for is a sense that feeling tones which connect us can respond, like a tuning fork, to certain notes, certain qualitative gestalts.

In America, we talk about movie dialogue with one another, and what was on TV, and sports. If you find, say, a fellow Alabama or Auburn fan, you have an instant connection, a harmonic.

What I am looking at is a chaotic system, like a galaxy spread across the horizon, which responds with visible order the moment the right note has struck. Any system which does not have harmonics is disordered, and the closer the harmonics get to the fundamentals of the human experience–birth, death, pain, love, tragedy, comedy, absurdity, meaning–the better they are.

When I listen to great classical music, it evokes deep feelings in me sometimes; at other times, I am pleased in a somewhat cerebral way by the order which has been created. It massages some part of me that needs massaging.

Country music is meant to evoke recognition: you have been in that situation, you know what he or she is talking about.

Music which does not do that, which talks about getting laid, or the feeling of power over other human beings, or superficial sybaritic pleasures, would tend to evoke, it seems to me, very superficial connections. You sound the note, and the response is dim, blurry, foggy, indistinct when it comes to deep human realities.

I don’t do this in a morbid way, but I think about death every day. I live my life in response to my understanding of the meaning of death. As I see it, that is the most sound general orientation possible. Of course I fear death, but I think of it analytically. I don’t think death is the end. I think I will see, there, what I have done here. Some of it will disgust and dishearten me, but I like to think some of it will look I did the right thing after all.

What happens to people whose only thoughts of death come to them in horror movies, who have no ability to contextualize and transcend it? It seems to me that the images of death multiply precisely to the extent the capacity to process them, to abreact them into life energy, declines.

You get more and more death, and less and less life. It is like trying to end hunger by eating cardboard. All of us are in the same boat, floating to the same destination; but we are increasingly alone in that boat. This is the outcome of unintelligent, superficial cultural strategies, most notably those of the intelligensia. They have been destroying without creating for well over a hundred years. Utopia is always in the future, and always coming to us, not us going to it. This is lunacy.

I think that will do for this post.

I pray in several senses, consistent with my beliefs.

I will at times send whatever positive energy I can muster out to anyone and everyone that needs it. I feel the energy, and the task is directing it without polluting it with what I guess I could call my “fatigue” energy (somewhat ironic, I guess, but even the universe slows down but never stops). I choose to believe this is beneficial, without having any firm evidence in favor of that conjecture (or against it, as far as that goes, since no natural laws are violated, in my understanding of how things work, according to our best models of reality). I choose to believe, not entirely without evidence, that applied consciousness has an organizing effect on the universe.

What I do not believe is that there is a God out there looking out for me.One does not have to celebrate many birthdays to observe that terrible things–cancer in children, car accidents, financial ruin–happen to genuinely decent people; not the ones who are secretly sinful, but actually decent people.

As I have often argued, pain is how we learn. Pain is temporary, in an eternal universe. It is impossible to say if some negative event will be good or bad. Even is someone dies, I believe in heaven, so I believe that they may well be the lucky ones, since their day of work is done for the time being.

When I pray, I pray to spirits of light. I believe that we are surrounded by positive beings, who exercise some small influence on events when they can. But we have to have already set up the sort of environment where their influence will work. God helps those who help themselves.

For myself, I normally only pray for two things: for courage, and for wisdom. I pray that whatever trouble comes down the pike that I can take it, that I can learn from it, and hopefully be clever enough to get out of it.

It occurred to me just this morning, that this is the prayer of a functional member of a self governing system. I have my own goals, and pray to be able to help myself. The opposite of this is “God, please take care of me and mine”. That is a dependent mindset.

I have known numerous people deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one once told me that “The Will of Allah”, and work seemed to be inversely related. The more they said “it is the Will of Allah”, the less they worked. If you look at any Islamic society, you will see that the “Will of Allah” builds palaces and mosques, and precious little else. This is not the mindset of a self governing people, and certainly not of a prosperous one.

Religious belief, clearly, can be done in different ways. And large outcomes always depend on repeated small beginnings.

This will be a post in two parts. First, the “Stimulus”.

It has long annoyed me that so little attention has been paid publicly to the patent farce of the dispersal of Stimulus funds. BILLIONS of dollars have been sent to non-existent Congressional Districts, and non-existent Zip Codes. For reasons known only to them, New Mexico Watchdog has taken down the description of the process they got from Ed Pound, El Jefe of the Stimulus accounting program. What he said was this:

Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.

“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

On my reading, this would seem to indicate a check—actual or virtual—is created by someone, deposited by someone, then self-reported. You get the money, then type in whatever information you want. That information is then duly relayed by the [bureaucrats]to the taxpayers, as if they had done their job.

This system, quite obviously, is open to fraud. If you are plugged in, you get money wired to you, your buddy Twitters you a password, you log in, then you type in anything that sounds plausible. Can we not suppose that legitimate recipients are cognisant of their district and zip code, meaning that errors of this quantity cannot be random? We are talking about amounts equal to the annual revenues of large multi-national corporations.

And according to their chief spokesperson, the very agency tasked with monitoring the money is in essence saying that if people cheat, they will not be caught. Once the money is gone, it’s gone.

Let us take this fact, and add it to the current Middle East situation generally. How would you get money from here to secret agents in, say, Egypt? Simple: you set up a front company supposedly doing “Stimulus” work, with one of your guys. They get a check which they claim was for the 22nd District of New Mexico. It’s “only” for $10 million, so nobody really cares anyway.

Your recipient is plugged into the Hawala system, and the money goes to agents in 6 countries. This is categorically not impossible. I have been arguing for some time that that money might just as easily have gone to radical groups in the U.S.

Are these uprisings random? If so, why so many, and all at once? The status quo in the Middle East has been much the same for the last thousand years. One greedy SOB has taken the place of another. Some have been more cruel than others, but democracy has never been seriously considered. Democracy has, however, long been a code word used by Leftists for tyranny. It plays well in the all-too-compliant Western media, and as long as you keep using the right words, you can kill innocent people in the name of freedom, jail innocent people people in the name of justice, and usurp power for an unelected elite in the name of “democracy”.

Taken as a whole, does this situation not feel a lot more like a Socialist Summer of Rage? Like activists have been going around, putting up posters, inflaming sentiment in public speeches and COMMUNITY ORGANIZING?

We read the Muslim Brotherhood initially did not back the protests. They weren’t sure what they were about. Is it not equally plausible that their agents set the whole thing in motion, and stayed publicly on the side-lines so as to not make their role obvious to all?

I am of course talking about treason here, on the part of Obama and his cohort, but why not? The man is plainly a radical, and ALL of these nations would on his accounting be the victims of Western Imperialism. We have kept many of these petty tyrants in power, largely to keep even worse tyrants from seizing power. Case in point: Iran. No rational human being can even BEGIN to argue that ordinary Iranians are better off under the Mullahs than the Shah. He only persecuted radicals who wanted to overthrow him. As it happens, his fear of a coup was quite justified. The Mullahs persecute, torture, and kill anyone who differs from them ideologically AT ALL.

Whenever you see these sorts of coups, you can run the numbers. Without looking it up, I can tell you–and someone feel free to prove me wrong–that the Shah killed or tortured say 200 people in the decade before losing his throne. The Revolutionary Guards, guaranteed, did that in their first six months in power. That is how these things always work. Does anyone seriously think the Shah’s torture chambers were closed, or that some amorphous decency of “the people” restrained them from using it to support THEIR AUTOCRACY? To be clear: the SAME FORM OF GOVERNMENT THEY CLAIMED TO ABHOR.

These protests in Egypt are not at all about democracy. When you look at leftist rabble-rousers, they will say ANYTHING they have to to get themselves installed in power. They then bide their time, let the dust settle, get the army and police under control, then take back EVERYTHING they offered, and more.

It is my considered feeling that at some point in the future, assuming our democracy survives, which I think likely, we will have just cause to look at large segments of our intelligence community–both civilian and military–with unrestrained contempt. All too often, they don’t do their jobs, in my opinion. They are shackled by political correctness, and sometimes just politics. Things are going on that they should know about. No excuses. It doesn’t matter who the Commander in Chief is. Get it done.

To Congress: a starting point is a THOROUGH, top down audit of the Stimulus. No more checks go out until the past checks are accounted for. And if they can’t account for the money, and if it is in the billions, we could impeach and remove Obama for GROSS negligence and dereliction of duty. You cannot lose BILLIONS without consequence. In the end, he is where buck stops. This is his responsibility.

Quoth Forrest (one wonders why he was named after the Fort Pillow villain, and founder of the KKK; another time): “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”. Any readers I may have are no doubt familiar with that. What is this really, though? A box of chocolates is not fully random: it is a system defined by the theme of chocolate.

In my own lurching way, that is my warning that this blog, too, wanders hither and fro, although not in a fully random way. Obviously, there are recurring themes and words.

Among them, good and evil. Since I use this blog in part as a sort of therapy–wandering is therapeutic for me–I will offer a shade of personal information. I have been sick for two weeks. Not enough to keep me from working, but enough to sap my enthusiasm. This never happens to me. My health is normally excellent. The last time was 15 years or so ago, when I was working a job that I think was literally killing me, and I got the flu, and no choice but to lay in bed for 3-4 days, which I never did even in childhood, at least that I can recall.

I think sometimes illness is thrown at you (let’s not worry about agency here) as a last obstacle when you are on the verge of a qualitative breakthrough. I had mine this morning, and expect my sickness to fade fairly quickly. (let’s hope!!!!)

I don’t want to discuss the details of that particular breakthrough, but will offer some other insights that came to me.

The most important was this: I don’t think we can ever fully purge ourselves of evil. I think we carry it with us everywhere. No one is immune from evil thoughts and evil impulses. No one is perfect. Yet, in important ways we are separate from both our good and our evil impulses.

The image I have is that of a room of statues and objects–to use a Harry Potter theme, let us imagine what I recall was called the Room of Requirement (whatever the storeroom was called where Malfoy was tinkering with the Vanishing Cabinet). Think of all your thoughts, and all of the actions they led to, in the course of a lifetime. Imagine them still, flickering with life, but frozen. Every bad thought you ever had is there. You can see them. The fumes of black smoke that emerge from the top of your head when–in your opinion–someone just did something stupid in traffic. A good example for me was how angry I was–the violent thoughts I had–at the refereeing of one of my kids ball games the other day. This sort of thing can never be eliminated fully, without eliminating life itself.

It is possible to cram oneself into a box–or more accurately to BE crammed into a box, but that is not living. If you have no room to move, you vanish, you cease to exist as a vital human being. This is the case in societies which mete out draconian punishments for moral infractions. Many Islamic societies would be perfect examples. You can’t be GOOD in such societies, because the same spontaneity that leads to genuine generosity of spirit can also lead to negative emotions of greed, anger, spitefulness, and all the others.

What I think our task is is not to deny our negative emotions–they are there whether we want them or not, and whether we acknowledge them or not–but rather to integrate them into our awareness, to watch them develop, bleed (they are always a sort of wound), and then fade. As we grow as human beings, we see them more quickly, and can “defund” them, stop feeding them, more quickly. They will always be there, but we can just let them float like momentary clouds over the sun on a wind-swept day.

Last night I dreamed I was speaking–interacting may be the better word–with Rumi. He had a line I made note of many years ago: “Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both, you don’t belong with us.” I asked him if he had evil in him, too, and he showed me some dark images (frankly, of the sort that pepper your local Redbox), frozen in shadow. These were impulses he had had while living.

Then I went up a level, and light was everywhere, and he was playing with his wives and children in Heaven. It was happy.

Then I went up one more level, and was in the light of God. The only way I can describe that feeling is that it scratches an itch you didn’t even know you had. There is this ineffably wonderful smell, and a sense of belonging and contentedness none of us will ever know in this lifetime. Actually, the line before the one quoted above is: “the cure for pain is in the pain”. That is relevant. If the reason why is not immediately obvious, think it over.

The point here, and the reason for the title of this post is that ALL OF THOSE WERE HIM. He was all of that. He could (can, in my view) see all of that, know all of that, be all of that, consciously.

It seems to me we all need to recognize that we are all fractured in some ways, and perhaps always will be. I can’t claim to know how the universe works, but plainly, as I discussed in dealing with the experimental work of Janet (I think I did that post; I had been reading William James brilliant “The Principles of Psychology”–just skip Freud entirely, and devote yourself to his work), we all have multiple “minds” even on Earth. Freud called it the Unconscious, but I think James is right to point out that it appears more congruent with the evidence to say that the less integrated among us have multiple conscious selves. Under hypnosis, they exhibit autonomy of consciousness.

All of this is a bit disorienting, no doubt. I think what ties it all together is a tendency towards love. Things are splitting and rejoining in this world all the time. What I am describing is one direction, one possibility of movement. The other of course is unity.

Few thoughts. Hope they make sense and are helpful to someone. Feel free to email me if I messed with your mind. This is a bit deepish.

I have written a lot–I think mainly in my notes–about the mythical world Joanne Rowling created in Harry Potter. I own all the movies and have watched all but the most recent one numerous times. I read the last two. I like them on many levels, and am always amazed at how creative she was.

The short point I wanted to make this morning (and I had logged on to post something else) is that she has created a model of English virtue. In a post-virtuous world, this is something of a miracle, that she has smuggled something old into the modern (can I say post-cynical? Doesn’t cynicism imply you once cared?) world.

There is courage, loyalty, keeping a stiff upper lip, and yes, eccentricity.

I think this should be added to her list of accomplishments.

I was listening to the Rolling Stones song “No Expectations”, and thought about the lyric “once I was a rich man/now I’m so poor. Never in my sweet, charmed life have I felt like this before.”

I got to thinking: it’s unclear if his “wealth” was literal or figurative, but if he was a typical hippy, it was both.

Then I got to thinking about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”. “You went to all the best schools, but you know you only used to get juiced in it”. Something like that. Rich girl, who gave it all up to wander, and wound up having to in effect sell her body to get by.

Look at the social wastelands generated by the 60’s. Was there really hope? What happened to them? Some were permanently damaged by drugs or died–I’ve known several people who had no idea why they were still alive–but most of them just sort of stopped wandering at some point, and settled down–petulantly, no doubt, at first–then started living more or less ordinary, bourgeois lives after a ten year or so gap.

What did they get in that period? You’ve all heard the old saying: if you can remember the 60’s (70’s), you weren’t there. David Bowie supposedly lost an entire year of his life. Is that really living?

I think it is past time to recognize that the 60’s, far from being a period of deep creativity, were in fact characterized by a profound neglect of social responsibilities–to the future, to the present–and the hauteur with which former drop-outs looked at those who failed to sympathize with them does nothing to mitigate this.

Urban blight is a product of the socialism of the 60’s. The inability of wide swathes of our youth to achieve a sense of belonging and “ennestedness” is a product of the 60’s. The essence of Conservatism is to try and protect what is useful in human life, and the most important of this is extending to our children a place in the world, and a sense of belonging there, and the capacity to be happy there.

A trap, you say? Nothing doing, you say? Normality is for fools. It is for saps. It is for cowardly conformist losers. The true “life” is on the road, in the winds of passion, not stuck in some 3 bedroom suburban home raising kids.

Before you insist on that riff, look at the world we actually live in, not the fantasy you can imagine. Millions of kids hit the road in the 60’s. Did it do them any good, on balance? Are they happier? Most of the ex-hippies I know are neurotic and maladjusted. A high percentage of them have or have had to overcome substance abuse problems. People who are happy don’t feel the need to anesthetize themselves, which is all drugs do. That is why you voluntarily lose long periods of your life. That is not living.

Living is having useful work to do, and people around you who understand you, care about you, and are loyal to you. Vagrants do not have useful work, and they cannot rely on most of those around them. Deadheads are notoriously flaky. They love one another when they are high–I’ve seen it–but I’ve also noticed that long term LSD use makes people irritable, and lacking in even the most basic emotional self control.

There are so many examples–we are surrounded by them–but take this song, by Green Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8krdLDuEx3U

Listen both to the quality of the music–the mechanical dullness, the dissonance–and listen to the lyrics. He is probably singing about trying to sleep while stoned, but a clear element in this is almost certainly clinical depression. He is sad. He has no point or purpose.

And his parents were likely hippies. They likely didn’t discipline him, and probably taught him that much of America is “bullshit”, and that the spontaneous arrogance of youth is superior to the time-honored truisms of the old and the dead.

And this is what you get.

A wicked wind blew through here in the 60’s/70’s. All of this is the result of only PARTIAL rejection of God and American ideals. This is a hint of socialism, only a hint. Much worse is possible.

At the same time, much better is possible, if we can look at this era and its aftermath with unjaundiced and new eyes.

It has seemed to me more than once that the stubbornness with which former hippies hold their political views–in the face of all evidence continuing to argue they have merit–is in no small measure related to a desire for that apparently wasted part of their lives to have actually MEANT something, when in reality they were just running–and not finding–in almost all cases.

As I use the term, it is “An Emergent Property of any social or individual system in motion defined by:

Self Pity/Resentment
Perceptual rigidity
A lack of the ability to directly control internal states, making that person or group entirely vulnerable to whatever happens outside. This in turn leads to a need for power.

This basic complex, of course, leads to hatred, to the rationalization, as needed, of actions taken to gain power; and quite often to the full rejection of any conceptions of shared humanity–outside, perhaps, of a small group.

Take the Iranian Mullahs. They are evil. They beat women that dress inappropriately, in their view. In so doing, they are operating from a very ridgid system of thought, and rejecting as relevant in any way the humanity and feelings of those women.

Undergirding the enterprise is a constantly stirred up resentment of Israel. One would think that if only Israel were destroyed, then paradise itself would ensue. This is a stupid and childlike idea, but it is one that is emotionally effective with the disenfranchised and uneducated.

I think this basic thought pattern is close to the truth.

Someone said to me that hate and fear are related. I think the connection is in that last aspect of the definition. Weak people fear change, since they doubt their ability to cope with it. This leads to a fear of change. This can, in turn, lead to a fear of any person or group who does things differently, since the public display of nonconformity could lead–such people fear–to change. Historically, this has both enabled and encouraged the conquest of differing cultures. First, you get their stuff, which is sufficient reason for the non-fearful; but second, you gain control of their lives, and no longer have to coutenance difference.

Islam was perhaps the first system of thought whose conquests were based exclusively on the elimination of cultural difference. Prior to them, most conquests were just for booty and land, and cultural conditioned imposed solely for bureaucratic efficiency. After the Muslims set the example, though, you did see similiar things in the New World, particularly the parts upon which the Spanish afflicted themselves.

Is such conquest evil? Yes, I think it is. Does that make religion evil? No. Islam spread throughout Central Asia without conquest. Buddhism, of course, went from India to Japan without a single shot fired.

In all this my logic is simple: if I define Goodness as the Emergent Property of the interactions with matter of the rejection-of-self-pity, perseverance, and Perceptual movement/Breathing, then Evil would be the opposite. They are self pitiers, quitters, and dogmatists or indifferent outright to higher perception.

I use these terms since I think they have value, but I want to emphasize that there is never in this world one to one congruence between either term and any human being, group, or institution. Where we want to have a little white ball opposed to a little black ball, the reality is that if–we an example–visualize them as crumpled up bits of paper, describing everything about that, say, person, then we will see both good and bad. We will see more writing/facts/opinions that tend towards hate in the black ball, and more than tend towards a sense of common humanity and love in the other, but both will have blots. None of our saints have been perfect, even by our own standards. Perfection, per se, is only possible in limited areas, and then only at the cost of rigidity in some other area.

Two quotes I offer up often: “Renounce sainthood: it will be a thousand times better for everyone”, from Lao Tzu; and “Perfect goodness is crooked”, by Chuang Tzu.

Take Egypt. A useful way to unroll this is to look at the economic system, as decribed here (you have to pay $8 a month to get the whole thing, which shouldn’t break anybody’s bank; I read the original in the paper edition).

What he describes is a system where it is almost impossible to get title to anything. If you want to open a generic business, the paperwork takes five years. So what do people do? They just set up wherever they can, whenever they want to. But this is a shaky, unsecure way of doing things. It also happens outside the taxable economy, and since it represent an amount of activity equal to or greater than “legitimate” business activity, it needs to be factored in strongly in any policy discussion.

In most developing nations, the simple act of defining and protecting property rights would go a long way towards both economic development and political stability. This should be the goal, and it is an eminently reasonable goal.

Socialists, being Romantics temperamentally, want to see mass uprising in the street, coupled by VICTORY over THE MAN. It would be like their side won. They foolishly conflate Liberal ideals with anyone who rises against an autocratic state. This is of course historically impossible to defend. Even in the paradigmatic Leftist revolution, the French Revolution, they wound up with a tyranny that made Louis XVI look like a model of temperance and moderation. Same with Lenin. Both killed more political prisoners in their first year in power than the regimes they overthrew had killed in the previous 100. This is a universal pattern. You easily add North Korea, China, Cuba, Iran, and others.

Mubarak, in sum, is neither good nor evil. He is a combination. The Muslim Brotherhood, likewise, is mostly evil, but they have done good things. They have provided charity, and the other sorts of social services that even American gangsters were known for.

The question, on Egypt, is this: given that the overarching task is to move in the direction of global peace, prosperity, liberty, and contentment, what policy best moves us, however slowly, in that direction? And if we can’t move IN that direction, which policy causes us to diverge from that goal the least quickly?

That is how I think we need to address these things.

There is a system of movement, both emotional and physical, that has long been a part of the Tibetan system of ritual practice, and which was codified in a usable form for Americans by Tarthang Tulku. The books I have are out of print, but I think this is the reprint here.

It’s not really yoga. You get to move around, and rather than emptying your mind, you focus on your body, and the sensations you are feeling. I seem to be a kinesthetic person, on balance, and this system works for me.

Structurally, I see it as the antidote to the false dichotomy people draw between a life of passion and life of duty. I used the metaphor earlier of living between two goal posts. This helps you float up, emotionally, and spiritually. It is the antidote to feeling trapped. It helps you draw nurturing feelings from even the most common experiences.

I would go so far as to say that if one truly “gets” what is possible here, you don’t really need to travel, to roam the world, or to live an exciting life. If you can make ALL experiences larger, then the small becomes large, larger even than the exotic is for those with neither a talent nor training for experience.

Kum Nye is a way of engendering individually useful emotional movement, in socially useful and constructive ways. This is absolutely not an athletic system. It is a system for unlocking emotions that have been trapped somewhere.

It has been immensely useful for me, so I thought I would pass this along. I feel I have mentioned it before, but who knows where or how long ago. As a general rule, I try never to discuss problems for which I have no solution. This is my recommended solution to the Romantic impulse.

Romanticism is the pursuit of tragedy, yet is characterized neither by catharsis nor the cultivation of empathy. It is ritualistic, even compulsive, and awakens no sleeping giants, except in the end those of despair. The grand passion is ephemeral, but the effects of the actions guided by someone under the thrall of such a grand passion linger.

Romanticism is a sickness, for which the cure is emotional maturity.

These are a few broad stroke comments. I’m not sure even I agree with them. I will have to think about it.