That the goal of life from life's point of view
is to get everyone on earth to envy you.
That the problem of evil is overcome
when you realize the need of compassion.
The volumes that need to be written on this title and these verses bring to mind St. John of the Cross, whose only volume (as far as I know), The Ascent of Mount Carmel, includes The Dark Night of the Soul, which is a gloss on a poem of his own composition, which then serves as a mnemonic for the exegesis. The formula is brilliant. Why is it not used more often?
I doubt the day will ever come when I can put down the reflections that created these or the development that comes from these--with all their hedges and qualifications. But just a couple notes then: Freud was not the first to posit that dreams know more about us than wakefulness, that the unconscious is truer than the conscious mind. It's like believing that children and animals are closer to God than nuns and priests or any adult however devout. But as the other verse says,
I am not who I am
when I am naked
unless I am naked
right now
and I'm not.
Moments are layers of the past and trajectories for the future piled on the now. But there is only now. If the past exists, it exists now. If love exists, it exists now, in actual acts of feelings being expressed. Do I love you when you are not in my thoughts? Do I see you when my eyes are closed? Or is my belief that I do just persistence of motion? If I sing "I will always love you and I always have loved you" I mean that at every opportunity, at every moment when it mattered I did, when it will be I pledge to (and yet I have failed and will fail). It doesn't cover the moment I'm charging down the field with all my concentration on getting getting the ball past the defender into the net, though the past and the pledge may figure in their way.
For the first couplet, a short cut, Girard. But so much needs to be added.
For the second, the way around the first, because the goal of arousing universal envy is so obviously self-defeating it's laughable.
