Liminal Thoughts

 All revolutions are necessarily failures; by strange and unexpected pathways we arrive at where we mean to be. For most of us, all we are doing is setting up pathways for others; building networks, holding lines, making tiny advances, until finally a decisive blow can be struck - often enough not in the way we intended. We come to belief through action, or (as the case may be) reaction; we respond to situations instinctively, uncertainly, then we turn around and explain this response as if it was always what we had intended. It is in this way - forever looking backward, only partially and haphazardly making sense of what is ahead -that we come to understand ourselves, become what we irrevocably must become: you cannot talk yourself out of something you have already done. "our time in this state was ephemeral...a season of discontent"

There is a certain callousness to happiness - a brutishness, a cold indifference to the suffering and immiseration of others. Although it must be said that there is one kind of happiness that results from a repression of unpleasant feelings, and another that arises from a dissipation of those feelings, often by coming to terms with them - the latter being much more valuable, and much more "real". Those who possess this latter type of happiness seem to spread their warmth, while those who possess the former seem to abandon theirs: what started as a natural, genuine smile soon hardens into a mask, behind which is emptiness, a total lack of personality. A poem I have mostly forgotten, by a poet whose name I don't remember, contained a couplet that has always stuck with me: "All I could do was dream of fame,/ While all the world went up in flames." In an obscure way I feel that this is related to the previous comments. Take the United States, for instance: while the...