I miss the xanga days, and before those the livejournal days. It would have been nice if I'd really posted entries here while I was in South America, but now I'll try again.
Still lost, although I'm back home (and have been for half a year). Getting more and more lost all the time so maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to find myself.
Now let's just dive in.
My last blog was titled "I came to live out loud," and that Emile Zola quote still very much describes me. But living out loud comes with advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes I live too much and sometimes I have these high, lofty, abstract questions that can't be answered except for perhaps through beautiful literature.
I'll suffice it to say I suffer from a severe lack of restraint. From brownies to beer and many things in between, I live in the moment and go with the flow. I have no regrets, which is not the same thing as saying I don't make bad decisions.
I also ramble.
Heart of Darkness is my go-to source when this whole restraint thing starts getting to me. Maybe it can be yours, dear anonymous reader, too.
"You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement under your
feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you,
stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of
scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular
region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way
of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter
silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of
public opinion? These little things make all the great difference.
When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your
own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to
go wrong--too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of
darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil---I don't
know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be
altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then
the earth for you is only a standing place--and whether to be like this is your
loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one
nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put
up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!
Does our restraint come from the whispering neighbours and policemen? Does it come from the devil and God?
Do we really have *innate* strength when all that's taken away? If there's no threat of scandal or punishment (heavenly or earthly), nothing forcing or expecting morality, how do we measure our own capacity for strength?
Those questions are terrifying. Especially when even in the midst of whispering neighbours, policemen, and God, people can do such horrifying things. I'm not sure I like thinking about how it would be if men and women were left entirely to their own devices.
I am not a fool ignorant of temptation, nor am I a thunderingly exalted creature deaf and blind to it. I am among those who fall in between, on this earth to live. I put up with the sights, the sounds, the smells that tempt and linger and I thrive in living out loud, for better or for worse.
