(no subject)
I read The Stranger by Albert Camus last week. There was a particular passage in it where a character, a pimp actually, had a girlfriend cheat on him after he spent months beating her in the relationship. The comedic value in this, of course, is that theoretically a pimp would possess little prerogative or inclination towards feeling indignant over such an episode but he still did. I mean this was just a small subplot and not really relevant to the actual main storyline but what happened was that he came up with this plan after having ended the relationship: he was going to entreat her to come back to him through sending her a sentimental and touching letter. He wasn't even going to write this letter, he was going to have a friend write it for him. When she came back to him he was going to convince her to have sex with him and just before finishing he was going to spit in her face and then leave. It sounds crass but honestly, isn't this the way that we actually really do treat people? I mean we do it in less raw ways. We're more "civilized" about spitting in the faces of those who love of us. Like leaving someone who tells you that they think that you're the most beautiful in the morning when you aren't wearing make up because that's the way you were created without warning or any explanation or abandoning someone who still wears your ugly orange and black bracelets because you once called them "friendship bracelets" in order to pursue a girl who spends her time attempting to create mystique about herself through intellectual dishonesty and displaying emotional ambivalence over a girl who spent over three years trying to break through your mystique, dishonesty, and ambivalence.
Contrarily:
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in a positive action, when his only achievement many consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way- an honorable way- in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of these words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.""
Viktor Frankl (Auschwitz survivor)