Pain Is Truth; All Else

The Barbarians Come Out At Night.

Scapegoating Worked In Practice While It Still Had Religious Powers Behind It. You Loaded The Sins Of The City On To The Goat’s Back And Drove It Out, And The City Was Cleansed. It Worked Because Everyone Knew How To Read The Ritual, Including The Gods. Then The Gods Died, And All Of A Sudden You Had To Cleanse The City Without Divine Help. Real Actions Were Demanded Instead Of Symbolism The Censor Was Born, In The Roman Sense. Watchfulness Became The Watchword: The Watchfulness Of All Over All. Purgation Was Replaced By The Purge.

The Writers Who Have The Deepest Influence On One Are Those One Reads In Ones More Impressionable, Early Life, And Often It Is The More Youthful Works Of Those Writers That Leave The Deepest Imprint.

That Was Our First Time Together. Interesting, An Interesting Experience, But Not Earth-shaking. But Then, I Never Expected It To Be Earth-shaking, Not With Him. What I Was Determined To Avoid Was Emotional Entanglement. A Passing Fling Was One Thing, An Affair Of The Heart Quite Another. Of Myself I Was Fairly Sure. I Was Not About To Lose My Heart To A Man About Whom I Knew Next To Nothing.

To The Last We Have Learned Nothing. In All Of Us, Deep Down, There Seems To Be Something Granite And Unteachable. No One Truly Believes, Despite The Hysteria In The Streets That The World Of Tranquil Certainties We Were Born Into Is About To Be Extinguished.