If you love someone, set them free
Heavy fare for a summer Saturday night . . . but hey, freelancers don’t know from weekends or vacations.
This is Kierkegaard on free will. It’s actually very advanced Christian theology. I’m neither qualified nor motivated to debate its provenance, its truth, or its craziness. I just find it beautiful and thought-provoking.
“. . . goodness is to give oneself away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent. All finite power makes [a being] dependent . . .
“It is incomprehensible that omnipotence is not only able to create the most impressive of all things—the whole visible world—but is able to create the most fragile of all things—a being independent of that very omnipotence. Omnipotence, which can handle the world so toughly and with such a heavy hand, can also make itself so light that what it has brought into existence receives independence, Only a wretched and mundane dialectic of power holds that it is greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent. No. Socrates had a sounder understanding; he knew that the art of power lies precisely in making another free. But in the relationship between man and man this can never be done . . . only omnipotence can truly succeed in this.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
It’s just this to the nth power.
depressed prosepoem
I don’t want to get online. Right now I feel cheated by the fool’s-fire of Facebook. The mirage of a life. A minuet of phantasms. We’re all working our holographic puppets, projections on a dimensionless stage. They can be withdrawn or extinguished at the flick of an eyelid. Disembodied Bunraku. Our smiling, painted selves strut their stuff while our unsmiling bodies, swaddled in black, twitch the strings to distract discovery away from our den full of bones.
Ambiance 