Did not the world become perfect just now?
I was driving home down the highway after lunch with some friends, and I felt it... happiness rose up in my soul like the bubbles in champagne. Though my winter guest was with me and grumpily tried to hold it back, my happiness overflowed me and burst over the world like a star. I drove home on a road of gold and the world became perfect all around me.
The mathematician in me wants to find some way of describing my ecstasy in a way that you can all understand. I want to be able to explain it, so that perhaps you can share it. This feeling I have is so amazing, so powerful, and it blows away my sorrows and gloom like the sun burning off the morning fog. How weak, how small, my troubles seem to me now! Whenever I am low, my spirit eventually returns to me in this way. Truth be told, I did not even know how low I was until a few days ago. And I was so fogged I couldn't remember the sun. It's surprisingly easy to forget the sun when it's not shining. But the sun will always shine, it never tires of it's great journey. It is so with my soul. No matter how I abuse it, nothing can tame it or conquer it. I will now share a passage from Nietzsche's Tomb Song that I urge all of you to read when you have a quiet moment. It is fitting that I think on this at the passage of the seasons.
"There is the isle of tombs, the silent isle; there too are the tombs of my youth. There I wish to carry an evergreen wreath of life." O you visions and apparitions of my youth! O all you glances of love, you divine moments! How quickly you died. Today I recall you like dead friends. From you, my dearest friends among the dead, a sweet scent comes to me, loosening heart and tears. Verily, it perturbs and loosens the heart of the lonely seafarer. I am still the richest and most enviable - I, the loneliest! For once I possessed you, and you still possess me: say, to whom fell, as to me, such rose apples from the bough?... ...My highest hope remained unspoken and unredeemed. And all the visions of my youth died! How did I endure it? How did I get over and overcome such wounds? How did my soul rise again out of such tombs? Indeed, in me there is something invulnerable and unburiable, something that explodes rock: that is my will. Silent and unchanged it strides through the years. It would walk its way on my feet, my old will, and its mind is hard of heart an invulnerable. Invulnerable am I only in the heel. You are still alive and your old self, most patient one. You have still broken out of every tomb. What in my youth was unredeemed lives on in you; and as life and youth you sit there, full of hope, on yellow ruins of tombs. Indeed, for me, you are still the shatterer of all tombs. Hail to thee, my will! And only where there are tombs are there resurrections. Thus sang Zarathustra. Thanks Fritz, for being there to tell me the words to express how I felt. Wish I could have done the same for you.
"There is the isle of tombs, the silent isle; there too are the tombs of my youth. There I wish to carry an evergreen wreath of life." O you visions and apparitions of my youth! O all you glances of love, you divine moments! How quickly you died. Today I recall you like dead friends. From you, my dearest friends among the dead, a sweet scent comes to me, loosening heart and tears. Verily, it perturbs and loosens the heart of the lonely seafarer. I am still the richest and most enviable - I, the loneliest! For once I possessed you, and you still possess me: say, to whom fell, as to me, such rose apples from the bough?... ...My highest hope remained unspoken and unredeemed. And all the visions of my youth died! How did I endure it? How did I get over and overcome such wounds? How did my soul rise again out of such tombs? Indeed, in me there is something invulnerable and unburiable, something that explodes rock: that is my will. Silent and unchanged it strides through the years. It would walk its way on my feet, my old will, and its mind is hard of heart an invulnerable. Invulnerable am I only in the heel. You are still alive and your old self, most patient one. You have still broken out of every tomb. What in my youth was unredeemed lives on in you; and as life and youth you sit there, full of hope, on yellow ruins of tombs. Indeed, for me, you are still the shatterer of all tombs. Hail to thee, my will! And only where there are tombs are there resurrections. Thus sang Zarathustra. Thanks Fritz, for being there to tell me the words to express how I felt. Wish I could have done the same for you.