121625 I can hardly bring myself to believe in the faith of suffering. Things are always easier than we'd like them to be.

121625 Today, I completed The Goldfinch; a grand, critically extensive book over which I’ve cried, mulled, and trudged. The dreamlike quality of Donna Tartt's idiolect charmed (hypnotized) me through it by some indiscernible obligation. Strings of thoughts and notions became so boringly prolonged and overdue, yet intimate and intensifying until I was left drunk on the narrator's evocative, drugged daze (a common manner in English novels, it seems; is the language culturally designed to never shut up?). It is impossible for me to define a "good" book, much less a favorite; never have I read anything in thorough, complete enjoyment. Yet, love comes easy to everything I have ever reminisced. Here is my most endeared passage from this reading, which I feel is a reward in itself for its beautiful, resonating flourish: ...I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? [...] it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement [...], all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not. writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

121425 Books are my only liberation from dogma.

121325 I am conflicted by the ever-constant change of self. I cling to the sustenance of an ideal.