To Be Stupid, And Selfish,

We Live On The Flat, On The Level, And Yet - And So - We Aspire. Groundlings, We Can Sometimes Reach As Far As The Gods. Some Soar With Art, Others With Religion; Most With Love. But When We Soar, We Can Also Crash. There Are Few Soft Landings. We May Find Ourselves Bouncing Across The Ground With Leg-fracting Force, Dragged Towards Some Foreign Railway Line. Every Love Story Is A Potential Grief Story. If Not At First, Then Later. If Not For One, Then For The Other. Sometimes, For Both.

But Then You Begin To Understand That The Reward Of Merit Is Not Life’s Business.

Not Merely Hope, But Any Burdensome Yearning: Ambition, Hatred, Love (especially Love) - How Rarely Do Our Emotions Meet The Object They Seem To Deserve? How Hopelessly We Signal; How Dark The Sky; How Big The Waves. We Are All Lost At See, Washed Between Hope And Despair, Hailing Something That May Never Come To Rescue Us. Catastrophe Has Become Art; But This Is No Reducing Process. It Is Freeing, Enlarging, Explaining. Catastrophe Has Become Art: That Is, After All, What It Is For.

Does Character Develop Over Time? In Novels, Of Course It Does: Otherwise There Wouldn't Be Much Of A Story. But In Life? I Sometimes Wonder. Our Attitudes And Opinions Change, We Develop New Habits And Eccentricities; But That's Something Different, More Like Decoration. Perhaps Character Resembles Intelligence, Except That Character Peaks A Little Later: Between Twenty And Thirty, Say. And After That, We're Just Stuck With What We've Got. We're On Our Own. If So, That Would Explain A Lot Of Lives, Wouldn't It? And Also - If This Isn't Too Grand A Word - Our Tragedy.

You Put Together Two Things That Have Not Been Put Together Before. And The World Is Changed.