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Scraps: On Myth and Suffering and other Reflections

An inability to bear suffering is an inability to participate in a real human fellowship [a tenuous construct, at best; the myth of a fellowship is as fragile as a spider's web, we must be agile enough to build, and dance, and play upon a foundation of running water], that is, a fellowship aware of its limits, aware of all potential conflicts that it contains, and ready to set its limits to the test [tests will fail; we will break, mend, and modify these limits]...

The more we are incapable of enduring our own suffering, the more easily we endure that of others [the cold hands, cold heart theory; If I can not admit my own suffering, how can I begin to comprehend yours?]. The harder it is for us to tolerate loneliness, the more of it we create.

We flee from love, which is or can be a source of suffering, shackling ourselves in a forced cynicism towards the whole field of sexuality, and forced by fear to abandon those enrichments of life which in love are rarely achieved without pain [The Myth of Love--and myth in general--degenerated when it changed into a doctrine, a product demanding and seeking proof. The criteria for this proof can never be exhausted, and we are left still seeking; always skeptical].

Pain pushes us away from this world [but not, as others would have it, beyond or above this world]. The natural tendency is to flee from pain, in an attempt to overcome the experience of the world as indifferent [the experience that our presence is but imagined, or ultimately meaningless]. The reversal [pain as the ultimate, as the only reality] attempts to circumvent the incompleteness of our fellowships [our communion with people need not be unsuccessful, but our success will never be complete; as if there were a barrier of nontransmittability].

This flight from myth is only a fall into another.

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