It's hard to look back on bad things from the past when they are not solved, and the tricky thing about life is that you don't get to choose what gets or does not get solved. A very cynical person can look at every single choice as a matter of probability. Do not what your heart, conscience and reason tell you to, but what is safest—take the road that has the fewest obstacles, the smoothest run possible.

That's no way of living. In Norm Macdonald's view, the gambling addict seems to understand this:

if you are at the table and you're rolling them bones, then there's no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt.

There are times in life when adventure calls you. The burning bush reveals your choices and you have to take a stance, neither of which being guaranteed to be painless. And sometimes you make a choice that basically destroys you for no reason. You are sure you're doing the right thing and picking the winning horse, but things don't go your way, and you find yourself hanging by the foot from a birch tree over a river of lava, to borrow an image from Bob Dylan. How does it feel?

My solution for dealing with terrible things that seem to have no explanation is that of grief.

You are not going to find an explanation, there are powers above that you cannot comprehend and you shouldn't even have the hubris to try to do so. Some things happen for reasons that are beyond you and tragedies happen for reasons that are beyond you. Trying to reason your way through tragedies might be the single worst thing someone can do if it holds them close forever to such pains. What good is understanding anything if you're destroyed in the process?

Listening to Joanna Newsom's "Goose Eggs", from what I consider to be her most positive album, Divers, I have always been attached to a very specific line:

What's redacted will repeat.

Dealing with people is hard, and breakups are even harder. Ideally, things should be sorted out and discussed, after all, that which you avoid discussing will not disappear but just manifest in different, newer, and more sinister ways. What is redacted will repeat. But any sort of breakup involves two people, and if one person doesn't want to discuss something, redaction is the only option. The fog will forever obscure the vision for both. In this sadder case, I can only see one option.

Grieve. Grieve the loss. Be it that of a friendship, of a love or both, grieve. They're not coming back except for a miracle. Miracles do happen, though.

In a very interesting song among his catalog, Bob Dylan sings

Now there's a wall between us, something there's been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed

The beauty of a personal relationship is often taken for granted when, in reality, it's a deep connection that involves a certain degree of intimacy and vulnerability. Once the wall is up, though, I tend to think it's impossible to recover what's been lost.

But what if you never make the choice out of fear of such a wall? Kierkegaard's aesthetic man famously said that there is no hope and you will regret both. But the aesthetic man merely fears discomfort, particularly that of boredom, which is certainly not the final evil. What if we are actually striving for something more, though?

Let's look back to the gambling addict's mind through Norm. "As you place your chips on the table, you feel anxiety and impatience", he says, and winning is not the point at all, for it only grants relief. The gambler's looking for something else:

It is after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt where they fall. It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.

Shouldn't all of us be hopeful? Shouldn't all of us want to live a peaceful, meaningful life? Wrong as the gambler might be, he has the courage that many of us lack, the courage to hope.

Joanna Newsom's Divers has a cliché leitmotif of cycles—a leitmotif of leitmotifs!—and as I said I consider it to be her most positive album. Take "Time, as a Symptom", which suggests how eternity can be taken from love:

Love is not a symptom of time,
Time is just a symptom of love
(and of the nullifying, defeating, negating repeating joy of life!)

Is there anyone who shouldn't be striving for this blissful monotonous joy?

It has to be said, however, that it is also true that we can get stuck in the repetition of that which is redacted and will forever torment us. That is the gamble.

The past might not be solved, but why deprive yourself of your own future? I'd advise anyone to grieve their losses, take the red dice, hope and shoot. We've all had too much sorrow.

God, I wish I'd take my own advice.

Although my younger self was quite impressed with the book, I do not share much of that now. The male characters are clearly woman-like — from this book, I'd say Mary Shelley was not good at writing men. The way Victor acts is the way a very romantic woman would want a man to act when faced with tragedy. Most characters are quite predictable, too. Elizabeth, Clerval, and all the others are characters written to be quite similar. All of them have a very specific purpose in the narrative: moving Victor to suffer the most.

But I accept that. The monster, after all, is the real highlight.

There are many Frankenstein's monsters in the real world, or at least many with his psychology. Even though my joke about online circles could be summed up to "tfw no gf", it's deeper than that. The absence of a woman is not the monster's actual problem. You can easily see that through the De Lacey family. The monster idealized the life of average peasants, struggling through life, and yearned for the moment when they would accept him in spite of his physical wretchedness.

Of course, other than the blind elder, no one could get past his looks and see the kind and gentle creature that he once was. He was repulsive.

No one in their right mind would want to associate with that much of an outcast because, even if he was indeed acting in a good manner, it could only be due to evil schemes and ideas. He has to be fooling you, just look at him!

It's easy to empathize with the monster, but I believe most people would not be able to actually do it if it happened before their eyes. The halo effect has been known for over a century, making us assume that one positive trait, such as beauty, is necessarily correlated with other positive traits, such as morality. Frankly, to some extent this phenomenon is justified, as beauty is an aspect of wholesomeness and wholesomeness is an objectively positive trait, not to mention that a good appearance can signal biological traits of health or fitness in general, but it can hardly be the only dimension of analysis.

But the effect that is the most interesting to me is how the rejection blackens the heart of one who is ugly. In the monster's words,

Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

At the end of the day, Frankenstein's monster proves that one cannot live without a social life. We are social animals, and we would be even if we were man-made abominations. As soon as we are conscious, we crave for warmth of companionship and, if that is denied, like the monster we have only our own makers to rebel against.

The rejects of society resent the ones who made them that way. They may have been benevolent and good; misery made them into fiends.

Although we can often identify with the monster's feelings, how many times did we actually see ourselves in the other end? How many people do we not like from their looks and generalize it through leaps of logic that make us despise their very being and everything they represent? Are we not close to the people who made him who he became?

Do we even suffer the same way that he does, or do we choose our own suffering by rejecting the hands that people offer us? Don't we prefer, at times, to reject the help that God sends us and "to rage against everything and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged"?

Are we not usually seduced by the idea of being an outcast, a damned person forever rejected and, therefore, justified in revenge? Even when we do not act upon this vengeful sentiment, do we not pat ourselves on the back for being such good people for not acting on it?

Often, yes, we are. Are we really rejected by everyone or do we just like the aesthetics of being a pure-but-damned soul?

There are many monsters who feel their happiness has been negated by society, and they are aware of what that would entail, and once the line is crossed, there isn't much holding them back from more and more degradation.

Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

Do these monsters not deserve our fair judgement?

A student once told me that I seemed to be fascinated with the theme of violence. Guilty as charged. That happened because I started discussing the book The Giving Tree and went into Shel Silverstein's ghostwriting work for Johnny Cash in the masterful song "25 Minutes to Go", where a prisoner counts his last minutes before meeting the gallows, and I had already previously discussed themes of violence in culture mostly using Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History as a source. It's not untrue. Violence is a taboo in culture, and as with any other taboo, it doesn't go away by pretending it does not exist in our daily lives.

Johnny Cash was not a gangster in any way, even if his cultural image might suggest so. Yes, he did have some passages in prison, but most of them were not serious. Actually, one of them was notoriously due to trespassing to pick some flowers on someone else's property. The other, however, still shows the scars of a man who's been through some things. At different points of his life, Cash was addicted to different substances, both downers and uppers, amphetamines (speed) and tranquilizers. Even worse, his alcoholism used to make the other addictions even worse. He never shied away from it.

He was not a violent person, but his violent personal imagery reflected in his work. Arguably his biggest song, "Folsom Prison Blues", tells the story of a man who shot another due to sheer boredom, "just to watch him die". As we all know, boredom is the root of all evil, so it should not surprise us that a bored man would do such a thing.

The narrator of the song is not a good guy that suffered some sort of injustice. Far from it, he's a villain, and he knows it. He is constantly reminded of his mistakes and how he threw it all away just to get a short rush of adrenaline. Yet, Cash makes us feel for him — it's not that hard to imagine ourselves being violent for the sake of not dealing with the deadly empty space of boredom. Doesn't silence judge us? Anything, but judgment! Do not dare to make me feel small! Anything but this hellish, finger-pointing boredom!

The contrast between Cash's life and the beauty he could find and perform — even in the most unexpected of places! — reminds me of a Tom Waits quote made immortal by Blank on Blank's animation. Regarding the constant stimulus presented by New York, often decadent, ugly and unwholesome to say the least, he says

I think it's good. It fractures you a little bit, or (...) I think it's stimulating for artists because if you're visually susceptible to images as optically, it's constantly bombarding you with a lot of information if you can take it without becoming part of it.

Cash took that information and ran with it. At times, he became part of it. It's not hard to see him giving in and turning into the character of "Cocaine Blues", one of his hits from his live album At Folsom Prison of 1968. The help of his muse June Carter was absolutely necessary, given that nobody is completely independent, but he did it. Ah, did he do it.

Prison may be seen nowadays by the law-abiding citizen as some sort of playground for violent men, but it wasn't always like that. The characters from traditional songs were violent and they had some conscience of the moral code they were trespassing, there wasn't the idea of a romantic criminal, kind of like the prisoners from Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House, his quasi-memoir of the long years in prison. And much like in Dostoevsky's book, Cash shows us how close the criminal is to the everyday guy, in their virtues, their flaws and their remorse. That jolt of excitement of killing someone is not worth it.

If you peek into traditional music, themes of love (or sex) and violence are abundant. But what might be left unseen but still catches my attention in "Folsom Prison Blues" is the world building. "I hear the train coming, it's rolling around the bend," he sings. The sound of trains is nostalgic in itself.

I rode a train once in my life, in Minas Gerais, going from Belo Horizonte to Governador Valadares, to the marriage of two dear friends. There is something inherently nostalgic about trains. I had never ridden one before, yet seeing the "serrinha" filled my heart for a nostalgia for something I had not yet lived, to quote the footballer.

Trains have always appeared in Bob Dylan's discography, which is rooted in traditional music. For example, his debut one has three of them mentioning trains. "House of the Rising Sun" has the narrator standing with one foot on the platform and another on the train, exactly in the middle. Trains represent difficult decisions. Once you are inside that boxcar, if you decide to look back, you're turned into stone. If you get frozen in between, you quite literally die. "Man of Constant Sorrow" follows on this logic: "I'm a-bound to ride that morning railroad, perhaps I'll die upon that train". The last one, "Freight Train Blues", is the only one that explicitly deals with this image, and associates the train to all sorts of emotions, making the orphan who sings it reminisce about the train teaching him how to cry and also bringing laughter with the blow of the whistle.

If you take a look at the albums with songs that mention trains the most, you'll see that many of them are either from the late 90s onward, when Dylan was bringing up these ideas on purpose, or from the early 60s, when he was borrowing directly from traditional popular music. In fact, that applies to all but four of the top 14, one of which has a title-track named "Slow Train", as you can see in the following table.

The title of 1975's Blood on the Tracks may be a reference to the bleeding songs that form its body. "Simple Twist of Fate" talks about the main character feeling "the heat of the night hit him like a freight train", maybe spilling the blood that baptizes the album. Of course, it can also be a reference to "music tracks", but why not both simultaneously?

"Idiot Wind" has two beautiful references to trains: "There's a small soldier on the cross, smoke pouring out of a boxcar door", and "down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy". A song about ending a painful relationship paints the picture of the narrator watching a soldier that has been through the same tracks that he is now over, unlikely winning a war, and leaving behind the haunting memories of the past relationship. Is that not a difficult decision?

You're on the crossroads. That's where you make the big decision. You are on highway 61 and you fall down on your knees, you ask the Lord for forgiveness and deem your soul to hell by bargaining with the devil.

And then the whistle blows. You "hang your head and cry". Back to "Folsom Prison Blues".

You are stuck in a bad decision while others are moving, freely on the train. And the whistle blows your blues away.

Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House portrays violent men who knew what they had done wrong. Akoulka's husband is probably the best example, having killed the only angel to pass by his life, Akoulka. But, somehow, when they do not feel as their crimes were justified and accept their guilt, these men are not monsters. They show their soul in the theater, trying to act the best way they can, when helping one another. But they also show their flaws when beating up one another or drinking until they pass out. Life is harsh.

One shoots a man in Reno just to watch him die. Another takes a shot of cocaine and shoots his woman down. In Eastern Europe, another drinks and axes his wife to death. Now they can only repent and try to live with dignity even inside of prison, against all odds. This is now their purpose.

Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing...

I know I can't be free...

At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash sang a song by Glen Sherley, one of the prisoners, called "Greystone Chapel". This man was living among the lowest of low-lives: murderers, drug addicts, all kinds of criminals. And he had a solution to life in prison, which he put down in the beautiful lyrics of his song. Even though "you wouldn't think that God had a place at Folsom", He "saved the souls of many lost men", and even though they are in a literal prison, "the door to the house of God is never locked".

There are men here that don't ever worship,
There are men here who scoff at the ones who pray
But I've got down on my knees in that grey stone chapel,
And I've thanked the Lord for helping me each day
Now, this grey stone chapel here at Folsom,
It has a touch of God's hand on every stone
It's a flower of light in a field of darkness,
And it's given me the strength to carry on

Inside the walls of prison my body may be,
But the Lord has set my soul free

A student once told me that I seemed to be fascinated with the theme of violence. Guilty as charged. That happened because I started discussing the book The Giving Tree and went into Shel Silverstein's ghostwriting work for Johnny Cash in the masterful song "25 Minutes to Go", where a prisoner counts his last minutes before meeting the gallows, and I had already previously discussed themes of violence in culture mostly using Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History as a source. It's not untrue. Violence is a taboo in culture, and as with any other taboo, it doesn't go away by pretending it does not exist in our daily lives.

Johnny Cash was not a gangster in any way, even if his cultural image might suggest so. Yes, he did have some passages in prison, but most of them were not serious. Actually, one of them was notoriously due to trespassing to pick some flowers on someone else's property. The other, however, still shows the scars of a man who's been through some things. At different points of his life, Cash was addicted to different substances, both downers and uppers, amphetamines (speed) and tranquilizers. Even worse, his alcoholism used to make the other addictions even worse. He never shied away from it.

He was not a violent person, but his violent personal imagery reflected in his work. Arguably his biggest song, "Folsom Prison Blues", tells the story of a man who shot another due to sheer boredom, "just to watch him die". As we all know, boredom is the root of all evil, so it should not surprise us that a bored man would do such a thing.

The narrator of the song is not a good guy that suffered some sort of injustice. Far from it, he's a villain, and he knows it. He is constantly reminded of his mistakes and how he threw it all away just to get a short rush of adrenaline. Yet, Cash makes us feel for him — it's not that hard to imagine ourselves being violent for the sake of not dealing with the deadly empty space of boredom. Doesn't silence judge us? Anything, but judgment! Do not dare to make me feel small! Anything but this hellish, finger-pointing boredom!

The contrast between Cash's life and the beauty he could find and perform — even in the most unexpected of places! — reminds me of a Tom Waits quote made immortal by Blank on Blank's animation. Regarding the constant stimulus presented by New York, often decadent, ugly and unwholesome to say the least, he says

I think it's good. It fractures you a little bit, or (...) I think it's stimulating for artists because if you're visually susceptible to images as optically, it's constantly bombarding you with a lot of information if you can take it without becoming part of it.

Cash took that information and ran with it. At times, he became part of it. It's not hard to see him giving in and turning into the character of "Cocaine Blues", one of his hits from his live album At Folsom Prison of 1968. The help of his muse June Carter was absolutely necessary, given that nobody is completely independent, but he did it. Ah, did he do it.

Prison may be seen nowadays by the law-abiding citizen as some sort of playground for violent men, but it wasn't always like that. The characters from traditional songs were violent and they had some conscience of the moral code they were trespassing, there wasn't the idea of a romantic criminal, kind of like the prisoners from Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House, his quasi-memoir of the long years in prison. And much like in Dostoevsky's book, Cash shows us how close the criminal is to the everyday guy, in their virtues, their flaws and their remorse. That jolt of excitement of killing someone is not worth it.

If you peek into traditional music, themes of love (or sex) and violence are abundant. But what might be left unseen but still catches my attention in "Folsom Prison Blues" is the world building. "I hear the train coming, it's rolling around the bend," he sings. The sound of trains is nostalgic in itself.

I rode a train once in my life, in Minas Gerais, going from Belo Horizonte to Governador Valadares, to the marriage of two dear friends. There is something inherently nostalgic about trains. I had never ridden one before, yet seeing the "serrinha" filled my heart for a nostalgia for something I had not yet lived, to quote the footballer.

Trains have always appeared in Bob Dylan's discography, which is rooted in traditional music. For example, his debut one has three of them mentioning trains. "House of the Rising Sun" has the narrator standing with one foot on the platform and another on the train, exactly in the middle. Trains represent difficult decisions. Once you are inside that boxcar, if you decide to look back, you're turned into stone. If you get frozen in between, you quite literally die. "Man of Constant Sorrow" follows on this logic: "I'm a-bound to ride that morning railroad, perhaps I'll die upon that train". The last one, "Freight Train Blues", is the only one that explicitly deals with this image, and associates the train to all sorts of emotions, making the orphan who sings it reminisce about the train teaching him how to cry and also bringing laughter with the blow of the whistle.

If you take a look at the albums with songs that mention trains the most, you'll see that many of them are either from the late 90s onward, when Dylan was bringing up these ideas on purpose, or from the early 60s, when he was borrowing directly from traditional popular music. In fact, that applies to all but four of the top 14, one of which has a title-track named "Slow Train", as you can see in the following table.

The title of 1975's Blood on the Tracks may be a reference to the bleeding songs that form its body. "Simple Twist of Fate" talks about the main character feeling "the heat of the night hit him like a freight train", maybe spilling the blood that baptizes the album. Of course, it can also be a reference to "music tracks", but why not both simultaneously?

"Idiot Wind" has two beautiful references to trains: "There's a small soldier on the cross, smoke pouring out of a boxcar door", and "down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy". A song about ending a painful relationship paints the picture of the narrator watching a soldier that has been through the same tracks that he is now over, unlikely winning a war, and leaving behind the haunting memories of the past relationship. Is that not a difficult decision?

You're on the crossroads. That's where you make the big decision. You are on highway 61 and you fall down on your knees, you ask the Lord for forgiveness and deem your soul to hell by bargaining with the devil.

And then the whistle blows. You "hang your head and cry". Back to "Folsom Prison Blues".

You are stuck in a bad decision while others are moving, freely on the train. And the whistle blows your blues away.

Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House portrays violent men who knew what they had done wrong. Akoulka's husband is probably the best example, having killed the only angel to pass by his life, Akoulka. But, somehow, when they do not feel as their crimes were justified and accept their guilt, these men are not monsters. They show their soul in the theater, trying to act the best way they can, when helping one another. But they also show their flaws when beating up one another or drinking until they pass out. Life is harsh.

One shoots a man in Reno just to watch him die. Another takes a shot of cocaine and shoots his woman down. In Eastern Europe, another drinks and axes his wife to death. Now they can only repent and try to live with dignity even inside of prison, against all odds. This is now their purpose.

Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing...

I know I can't be free...

At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash sang a song by Glen Sherley, one of the prisoners, called "Greystone Chapel". This man was living among the lowest of low-lives: murderers, drug addicts, all kinds of criminals. And he had a solution to life in prison, which he put down in the beautiful lyrics of his song. Even though "you wouldn't think that God had a place at Folsom", He "saved the souls of many lost men", and even though they are in a literal prison, "the door to the house of God is never locked".

There are men here that don't ever worship,
There are men here who scoff at the ones who pray
But I've got down on my knees in that grey stone chapel,
And I've thanked the Lord for helping me each day
Now, this grey stone chapel here at Folsom,
It has a touch of God's hand on every stone
It's a flower of light in a field of darkness,
And it's given me the strength to carry on

Inside the walls of prison my body may be,
But the Lord has set my soul free

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

— "Every Grain of Sand", Bob Dylan, Shot of Love

Life sometimes signals you in ways you do not expect. In one sense, every single day is an adventure where you may (or may not) have some plans and you constantly wager against Fate for your future. If you take seriously the idea of how much the outside world, inanimate or not, does not care about your yearnings and desires, you realize that can be a complete blessing.

When I was younger, still living with my parents in Brasília, for some time I had a car. My brother, going his way through medicine residency, lived in São Paulo and left his silver Renault. It was amazing that I had a car, until it broke down and I had to get it fixed. The brakes had an issue. The next time, it was a hit-and-run by a person leaving my car dented. And once, it was my fault, I confess. That's when I first took a glimpse at what it means to have a car — it means to take a trade-off where you get to listen to "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Benny Goodman while gaily driving and you let go of the predictability of having to go places on foot, when you know your limits, you can plan ahead and virtually never fail to reach your goal. I wish I had taken some time off to ponder about this issue a lot more at the time, because that is probably the greatest thing a young man can learn — other than "it goes real fast, and if you're not careful, it's too late".

Twice in the past twelve months have I been taken aback by how dreadful life can get, and twice has it been because of life circumstances taking cheap shots at me, due to no one's fault exactly. And if there is such a person to blame, I'd rather not know nor think about it, because of the biggest lesson I've had: if you do not give life a chance of redeeming itself, if such a possibility is taken as a hostage by an evildoer, it will never accept beauty and bliss.

Often, we are tempted to consider ourselves the person to blame. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard meditates on this individual for a while. Defining sin (and despair) as "before God ... in despair not wanting to be oneself, or wanting in despair to be oneself", the Dane describes at a point the kind of Pollyanna figures we sometimes see in real life that refuse to see the irreversibility of some bad events. Time moves exclusively forward, and these people do not realize that their possibilities only narrow down with its march. Everything is possible, they think, there will always be another chance. So they make their efforts half-heartedly because there's nothing at stake. But one day they will realize how much time they lost, and will despair over it.

This bubble-headed optimist then turns into their own opposite, refusing to see any light. In the realm of possibility, though, lies God, the one who can turn the impossible into something concrete. But if the person does not see the possibility, they turn to fatality. And as Camus puts it in The Rebel, you can only go so far when this is your philosophical outlook:

Nietzschean asceticism, which begins with the recognition of fatality, ends in a deification of fate. The more implacable destiny is, the more it becomes worthy of adoration.

And, after realizing all the possibilities were for nothing, the individual becomes cynical. His own suffering becomes the proof that he is right and there is no redemption. Kierkegaard observes:

If it should now happen that God in heaven and all the angels were to offer to help him to be rid of this torment — no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting, and now all that’s past; he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged, the one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on hand, so that no one will take it from him – for then he would not be able to convince others and himself that he is right.

My car was just one simple example of things that work fine 99% of the time because of complex systems that we never think about: the mechanics of the car, the brakes, the availability of gasoline. These things are a very delicate balance that one should never take for granted. The naïve optimist puts himself in a position of taking everything for granted. Had they known that their chances are not coming back, they would have made the best out of them. But when we realize it, it's not over. It's only beginning. We can still cast a shadow, even if a faint one, and we can still leave a footprint, even if a small one.

But, of course, the younger the person, the harder for them to understand this truth, and as I am no wise old man, that certainly includes me.

Any marginally mature person understands that we cannot live in an atomized society where nothing but our own desires are taken account for. Civilization does not merely suppress our instincts, as Freud argues in Civilization and its Enemies. As individuals, we cannot have enough information to get conscious decisions about everything, and our desires are often wrong because of it. Marriage, for instance, is a game theoretic solution to a very difficult problem of organizing society and individual lives, which Enlightnement skeptics did not understand and some rationalists to this day cannot comprehend.

Not everything that happens in life is good, but it might open doors to beauty and appreciation where otherwise you would not have seen them. We depend on things we have no idea of what they are nor how they work, and it is often better for that to be the case. Do you really want to be conscious of everything that can go wrong in your life, things that you are not even aware of? Or would you rather accept life as it comes, and appreciate how bad things are not?

It's not a surprise for me that there is a concept such as the Dark Night of the Soul. Before acknowledging that "all is well and/ All matter of thing shall be well", T.S. Eliot calls for us to "Descend lower, descend only/ Into the world of perpetual solitude". There, we will be tempted to forever get “distracted from distraction by distraction”, in a manner that is perfectly rational and controlled, but completely devoid of life.

Well, I'd rather invite the unpredictability and the possible instability if that means I'll be living. My plans are not God's plans, and all shall be well. As our favorite deeply closeted gay man says,

it’s true I lost it all a few times. But that’s because I always took the long shot and it never came in. But I still have some time before I cross that river. And if you’re at the table and you’re rolling them bones, then there’s no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Remember to enjoy life and not take anything for granted, because God is taking care of even what is vital yet goes unseen by your very limited and ungrateful human eyes.

Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content
I don't have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I'm gone
You always said people don't do what they believe in, they just do what's most convenient, then they repent
And I always said, "Hang on to me, baby, and let's hope the roof stays on."

— "Brownsville Girl", Bob Dylan, Knocked Out Loaded

Some time ago, I was thinking about C.S. Lewis' famous quote about tyranny. I think it's spot on — if people truly believe that they are righteous in their ways, even if it means terror, they will never back down. Ever. But that's only one perspective of the quote.

Something that's implicit in Lewis is that if you have the approval of your own conscience, you are not in torment. I am not sure if that's the case, but it sure is impossible to be in peace if the vector of your actions isn't aligned with the that of your conscience.

As soon as we realize that people will never back down, we may lose hope. Albert Camus was painfully aware of the horrors of humanity, yet in a letter to Jean Grenier he argues that a "certain continuity in despair can lead to happiness" and that even though in the entire Old World of Europe we see, in the human scale, nothing but destruction and decadence, optimism and love can still go hand by hand, as happiness is linked to love. "I know of times and places where happiness can seem so bitter that we prefer the promise of it," he writes, but this is only because we do not have enough heart to love, "to persevere in love". We have to take part in what he called the "celebration of beauty and the earth".

The same man who wrote, in The Plague, that "on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences" has hope. Yes, life is a struggle, but that would never mean that it is pointless. If anything, the opposite — you have something to do.

Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus specifically to deal with the issue of suicide, which he calls "the only serious philosophical problem". Suicide is precisely what Soren Kierkegaard believes is the end point of the merely aesthetic life. Think of it in terms of sensations and boredom: how awful would it be to merely go after pleasures indefinitely, being a slave to your own senses?

Like Nietzsche and Marquis de Sade, Kierkegaard believed that humans are naturally aesthetic people. It takes work to go from this life to the ethical life, the second stage. Kierkegaard might have died in pain because of a disease, but he practiced exactly what he preached. Sade and Nietzsche, however, died in agony, the first one pleading to Napoleon for his life and the second one going crazy for writing about impossible human standards while being a decrepit man. Even in the agony of breaking up his engagement, Kierkegaard chose it himself. Whose conscience was lighter on their deathbed?

You might think it's still tragic, but here is Kierkegaard, talking about precisely this problem. In Either/Or a famous passage says:

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.

You can't avoid being uncomfortable. It is still going to be painful whatever way you choose. And that's where the knight of infinite resignation comes in.

After the aesthetic stage, you get a little bit of consciousness. You do what is right regardless of what you feel about it, because it's the right thing to do. Obviously this is a higher stage than the merely aesthetic one where only your own sensations matter, but it might come at a huge cost — your own happiness. In Fear and Trembling he talks about a knight and a princess whom he can't ever have even if they have a history. "Does he want to forget the whole thing? (...) No! for the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole of one's life's content and still be the same." He can't have the princess, yet he can't forget her. "The knight does not cancel his resignation, he keeps [his love] just as young as in the first instance, he never lets it go."

The knight of resignation sees the beauty in life, lives for his ideals even if that means his life is going to be rough. He is, in Kierkegaard's words, a tragic hero. There is a beauty in being this true to yourself, something that not many are, yet it is unquestionably painful. "Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain", Bob Dylan would sing in the late 90s.

In late 2019, legendary youtuber PewDiePie made video on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, using as a context (and bait for an audience of gamers) the last Avengers movie. In it, he concludes that for you to become a knight, either of faith or infinite resignation, you must practice. And we can only practice if we understand what we love. In the Swedish youtuber's words, "by understanding what we love, we open ourselves up to becoming more vulnerable, but the knight of infinite resignation understands that (...) the world doesn't always fall into the right place and you will not always win." By understanding what we love and not "cancelling our resignation", we keep our loved object "just as young as in the first place".

A great example of infinite resignation comes in Norm Macdonald's book Based on a True Story. Reflecting back at his whole life, his rise to the top of the comedy world and the oblivion he was thrown into after Saturday Night Live, Macdonald says "Sometimes I get big laughs and think I'm the best stand-up in the whole world, and other times I bomb, and I think I'm not even in the top five," he jokes.

However, he still considers himself lucky to even have had such opportunity: "I never expected to be any more than a common laborer," he writes, "and I would have considered myself lucky to have achieved just that. But I was blessed with so much more."

This is the knight of resignation. In fact, throughout the book he is also an aesthetic man, escaping the horrors of life through Dilaudid, morphine and gambling (the only one he actually did in real life).

If the knight of infinite resignation is a perfectly ethical man, regardless of his happiness, the knight of faith not only is an ethical man but is an ethical man who believes. He believes that whatever was resigned can be won back through God's grace. He understands the logical impossibility, yet he believes — he's like Abraham! Kierkegaard argues that

(...) the knight of faith is just as clear: all that can save him is the absurd; and this he grasps by faith. Accordingly he admits the impossibility and at the same time believes the absurd; for were he to suppose that he had faith without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and all his heart, he would be deceiving himself, and (...) he would not even have come as far as infinite resignation.

I've talked about hope and optimism in the face of uncertainty in the context of personal lives, but surely, the external world doesn't have place for hope, right?

One of my favorite books ever is The White Pill by Michael Malice. After describing for 200 pages the horrors of the Soviet bloc, going on and on about systematic and bureaucratic torture, how evil people can be and have been in the past, he starts telling the tale of how it all came to a crash. However bad things are now, they're better than whatever we had previously. This is not merry-go-lucky Enlightenment optimism, this is terrifying optimism. The last paragraphs of Malice's book are powerful:

The foes of liberty are many and they are powerful—but they are not particularly impressive. They will do everything within their ability to convince others that their might is eternal, that battle against them is pointless and doomed to fail. This is just another one of their many lies. It is said that they will never give up. Yet does wanting power over others mean that they will necessarily get it, and get it easily? Does the fact that they supposedly will never give up somehow imply that their opponents should—or does it imply the opposite? Evil people surrender all the time. At a certain point the costs—in every sense of the term—simply become too high. They are not all-knowing—far from it. They are often not even particularly bright. They are not all-powerful. They are men and women, far closer to snakes than they are to gods. They can, will, and have been defeated many, many times.

It is possible that those of us who fight for the dignity of mankind will lose our fight. It is not possible that we must lose our fight.

That is the white pill.

In spite of everything, believe.

Norm Macdonald eventually seemed to have gone to the final Kierkegaardian stage and become a man of faith. In one of my all time favorite tweets, he says:

At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how could life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.

Arthur Herman in The Idea of Decline in Western History also makes this point at the end, after showing how end of cycle ideas of decadence have never got it right. He cites Tocqueville:

Yes, I sometimes despair of mankind. Who doesn’t…. I have always said that it is more difficult to stabilize and maintain liberty in our new democratic societies than in certain aristocratic societies in the past. But I shall never dare to think it impossible. And I pray to God lest He inspire me with the idea that one might as well give up trying.

I started writing this with the song "Brownsville Girl" in my mind, but I have to come back to another Dylan gem. One of the answers to Macdonald's tweet (which isn't mine) mentions exactly these lines:

It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be
But she ain't a-gonna make a move, I guess it must be up to me

— "Up to Me", Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series Volume 14: More Blood, More Tracks

We were supposed to have a free month and just follow our interests, in Felix's own words. I read two books, one was a compilation by Dostoevsky, containing White Nights and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and the other was Portuguese writer Jaime Nogueira Pinto's Bárbaros e Iluminados, a more political reading.

The former gives me the opportunity to talk about one I'd read the month before, René Girard's Ressurrection from the Underground. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I took the life-changing course Mapa do Subsolo by Pedro Sette-Câmara, focusing on applying the Girardian interpretation of Dostoevsky's underground image to one's personal life, so I took a page from the man himself to try to understand my favorite author a little better.

A common sentiment with people who read the incredible Notes from Underground is to identify with the pathetic narrator of the book. Sette-Câmara defines the underground as a poetic image of "maintaining the position of moral victory even when defeated, in the ditch". At the same time the underground man feels like the greatest man on the planet and worse than a worm. He is drenched in ideas and completely detached from his reality, which is much more nuanced. Like every man, he has his faults and strengths, his pros and his cons, his virtues and his vices, but he cannot comprehend this.

Girard doesn't shy away from the initial part of Dostoevsky's career, which was far from as groundbreaking as his latter works, nor from his horrible personal life. The Russian basically tortured his first wife Maria Dmitrievna by forcing an untenable level of romanticism, that could never show his vulnerabilities because of the idealism of his own love. Some of Dostoevsky's own words about her include:

"I don’t want to give the impression that I’m working on my own behalf." "I love her insanely. . . . I know that in many respects I act absurdly in my relations with her, that there’s almost no hope for me—but whether there may be hope or not is all the same to me. I cannot think about anyone else. To see her only, only to hear her . . . . I am a poor madman. . . . A love of this sort is an illness."

On this, Girard notes that "[p]ushing the logic of this reasoning to an extreme, [Dostoevsky] adopts the behavior of his own heroes and makes himself the advocate and supporter of his rival for the young woman." The man who gave us the underground man was not far from being the underground man himself.

The main character in White Nights is nothing short of pathetic, and sees himself as the correct person for Anastasia, his idealized model (the external mediator, Sette-Câmara and Girard would say), which he adores and sees as the woman's salvation. In his personal life, Dostoevsky tried to put himself as the savior for his first wife Maria, but at the end he was nothing short of pathetic, making her a very miserable woman until the day she died. Dostoevsky himself said that "[b]ecause of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became".

Dostoevsky was in the Petrashevsky Circle of left-wing liberal and westernized intellectuals that sought revolution in Russia. After going to jail and going through the experiences of The House of the Dead, a great novel, Girard says that "perhaps there was no other outcome for the Dostoevsky of 1863 than madness or genius". He gave up on the Western ideals in favor of a more reactionary political position, and Notes from Underground is the first step in that direction.

The novella is most discussed by Girard through the psychological aspect and the image of the underground. Thing is, the underground is the place where ideologies often viralize. The book, by criticizing ideologies that purport to explain human nature and engineer utopias (symbolized by the Crystal Palace), ends up talking about the subject of one of the other books that I read in March.

Jaime Nogueira Pinto is a Portuguese writer whose work was introduced to me through a friend a long while ago, particularly through the podcast Radicais Livres (Free Radicals). "Barbarians and the Enlightened" is a title that suggests much of the political climate of the recent years, but the subtitle — "Populism and Utopia in the 21st Century" — may suggest much more.

Nogueira Pinto is basically describing the Whig theory of history, which is an Enlightenment idea that directly opposes the contemporary reactionaries. For these barbarians, no, the world isn't constantly getting better and globalism is a threat that should be taken seriously. Nigel Farage explains it best:

The European Union has become a sort of prototype for what Hillary Clinton and some of the Wall Street banks want to see. Namely, where individual nation-states give up their democratic rights, give up the supremacy of their courts, and hand it all over to a higher global order that wants to homogenize, harmonize, and make everybody the same.

Who is a better figure to open such a book other than "the son of the lights" Emmanuel Macron, who didn't even bother to play the Marseillaise, France's national anthem, in his victory speech, but the EU's "Ode to Joy"? And, naturally, he is also a great example considering that he openly disdains the barbarians, who are still stuck at the darkness of the irrational past? He is, after all, "waiting for a new hope, a new humanism, for a safer world," and "Europe and the world are waiting for us."

The natural criticism to such an approach to politics is that global coordination is nothing short of... utopian. And yes, it is. The Portuguese writer traces back the origins of such an utopian thought, showing the influences of the likes of Marquis de Sade, the utopian socialists, and dismantles how these ideas created horrifying scenarios including communist China and the USSR. Not only that, the reaction to such thoughts also created Fascism and Nazism.

For such utopias to work, there is the need of a sort of gnostic initiation of the select few who are going to work out society according to their whim. Uniting this megalomaniac necessity to the "killing of God" that the likes of Sade were trying to do — by taking morality out of the human world, which leaves us with nature, desires, impulses and violence — the resulting view is a form of amoral landscape where human beings are reduced to mere biological machines, where passions are nothing but distractions from boredom and sex — there is no love without the transcendental — is no more than the mechanics of sensation.

The rebirth of Sade in the mid 20th century by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, the existentialists and beatniks mixed the libertine utopian socialists created the grounds for hippie culture, which ended up being nothing but puppets for intelligence agencies, as even Frank Zappa knew — what was LSD but a government plant?

With the fall of the USSR, Nogueira Pinto argues that Fukuyama's theory of the "end of history" is full of shit and neoliberalism isn't the end. He gives as examples the case of Brexit in the UK, of the Le Pen family in France (though he probably would never have guessed that Marine would be banned from running in 2027), and of Donald Trump in America. It's hard to argue against him.

Populism was the tool against globalism. It's a very Machiavellian way of thinking but it's true.

Nogueira Pinto ends up by discussing the cases of populism around the world, commenting even the Brazilian case. As in other cases, our barbarians have little to no in common as a group, they basically just reject the current rulling class of globalists, while also being moved by the desire for revenge against groups who abused them systematically through ideological justification.

As anarchist Michael Malice says in his great book The New Right, such a group can be defined as

A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.

Indeed, if there is something that I can learn through reading Girard, Dostoevsky and Nogueira Pinto, it is that equality is a false god. Much of our political motivations are nothing more than desires and justifications that rule us. The desire to design society, to make other act conveniently or in a way that you accept — the Crystal Palace! — that is what moves the enlightened ones, and that is what the barbarians of the New Right fight.

I fought with my twin
That enemy within
'Til both of us fell, by the way

— "Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through the Dark Heat)", Bob Dylan

One of the best quotes by one of my favorite authors and trolls, Michael Malice, is that "conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit". Evidently, this is true, as most conservatives don't stand in any firm ideological ground and merely just express nostalgia for whatever happened when they were kids and, therefore, naïve. Recently, though, I came across a more "psychological" view of the issue that seems just as true to me.

One of my favorite Brazilian influencers, for the lack of a better term, is the writer Pedro Sette-Câmara. Although a disciple of the late Olavo de Carvalho, who although very politically influential on Brazil as the author of the as far as I know untranslated O Jardim das Aflições is perhaps best known worldwide for either his debate with Russian philosopher Alexandr Dugin or his contributions to the understanding of classical Platonist and Aristotelian philosophies, Sette-Câmara has parted ways with his former mentor in many regards, though certainly not completely. Nowadays, he seems more interested in talking about literature and much less in politics, though often he does have great observations to make.

For once, take the Brazilian romance Esau and Jacob by legendary author Machado de Assis, that happens in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. From the title, you can imagine a story about fighting twins, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Given the promise by a half-Indian fortune-teller that good "things of the future" would happen to her twin children, Natividade develops intense anxiety over what the future holds for her family. "They fought in their mother's womb, so what? People fight out here too. Your sons will be glorious," the seer said. Maybe that has something to do with the Brazilian revolutions that destroyed our monarchy and instituted the republic?

Ironically, Natividade was not too happy about the pregnancy. It meant, after all, no more parties, no more fun. "There went balls and parties, there went liberty and leisure. (...) Such was the first sensation of the mother, and the first impulse was to crush the seed. She became angry at her husband," we read in chapter 6. An amazing storyteller, Machado de Assis is not suggesting that the mother was angry at her children or her life, but merely explaining the emotional roller-coaster of pregnancy. As soon as the boys Pedro and Paulo (Peter and Paul, after the saints) were born, you can see that she is as worried and neurotically careful as a normal Brazilian mother, and fears for their future when she notices that all they do is fight.

For historical context, although very unpopular by the time, slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, the republic installed in 1889 and the current constitution written in 1989, which makes it hard for anyone to take seriously the appeal to any sort of Brazilian political tradition. Pedro was a conservative and Paulo a revolutionary, but what does that really mean? The former is a monarchist, the latter a republican. The former sees the end of slavery as "an act of justice" and the latter as "the beginning of the revolution". The former loves Louis XIV, the latter Robespierre. The former is a conservative and the latter a revolutionary.

If it weren't obvious enough that the brothers defined themselves through the competition with one another, they supposedly love the same woman, Flora, who is genuinely divided between them. The most interesting character in the book, our lily of the west seems like the only flesh-and-blood person in the story.

She also envied the imperial princess, who would become the empress one day, with the absolute power to dismiss ministers and ladies, visitors and petitioners, and then to remain alone, in the innermost rooms of the palace, luxuriating in contemplation and music. That was how Flora defined the task of governing. These ideas came and went. Once someone said to her, as if to spur her on: "Every free soul is an empress!"

However, because the two characters only define themselves in opposition to their twin, they live as a function of pure mimetic desire. Because Paul wants a revolution, I, Peter, will fight to conserve our current political establishment. Because Peter wants to be keep our political landscape, I, Paul, will fight for a revolution. And, of course, Paulo wins in the end, after all Brazil still is a republic. Not only that, he found a way to be a revolutionary against the current government because revolutions are never over. As Lenin would say, "When the Revolution is out of danger, external and domestic, then free speech might be indulged in."

And this is how Machado de Assis was the first author I know of to say that conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit.

Sette-Câmara's twist is more psychological. What if conservatives and progressives are just holding their opinions to spite their adversaries? Are they really all that different? What is conservatism if not a vague opposition to whatever is considered progressive now? Were it not for your enemy's desires, would you even desire whatever it is you desire now? Are these political beliefs real, or are they just a mask? It doesn't even need to be political, as the twins' mother Natividade, a Catholic, was also going to an indian seer and she "had faith, but [was] also embarrassed about what others might think, like a devout who crosses himself in secret."

His approach is Girardian in nature. I can vouch for the Church father René Girard for having influenced many people I admire such as Sette-Câmara and the music historian Ted Gioia, but as of now I haven't read a page of him directly. Whenever he is the subject of discussion, though, I can't help but wonder: how much of whatever belief I, or anyone else, hold is merely a form of spite? And reading Esau and Jacob, knowing the tragic fate of Flora, who raves and dies out of an illness of the heart for the two men who seemed to "love" her merely out of spite, how much suffering do I, or anyone else, cause to innocent people as a byproduct of said spite?

In his 9/11 album Love and Theft, Bob Dylan notoriously ripped off many authors, including Virgil, Ovid, Mark Twain and, somewhat surprisingly, Japanese author Junichi Saga, who wrote Confessions of a Yakuza. So, out of curiosity and boredom, I read it.

One can easily see why Saga's work caught Dylan's attention. Telling the story of completely deromanticized criminals, the book oozes the kind of energy from albums like 1976's Desire, people with mundane lives but who live in the edge of the law. The aforementioned Love and Theft has always seemed somewhat of a mafioso album because of the gem "Floater", whose lines invoke such imagery:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your own life
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I've seen enough heartache and strife
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once, though, I suppose
To go along with all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all the Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves

The idea of the book is to be as loyal to the actual stories of a real-life yakuza, Eiji Ichiji. Mr. Ichiji was a yakuza, and happened to become an old patient of Saga, a doctor from modern Japan. Much of the book is basically explaining the perspective of another country from another era.

Although it did take a hit with its modernization, it's hard to say that Japan even after submitting at the end of World War II doesn't have an unique culture. They are, after all, the main producers and consumers of very specific products, including things incomprehensible to non-weeaboos, like tentacle porn. That reflects in both the perspectives of Saga and Ichiji.

While Saga shows a deep respect and even admiration for his patients which is hard to find in Western medicine, the contrast that makes itself more visible is not that of the change in Japanese culture, but the change in our times. The book isn't about a particular culture, necessarily — Bob Dylan resonated a lot with it — but about a particular state of spirit that isn't all that common nowadays. The sheer boredom would kill a modern person.

But that was not an issue for them and probably isn't an issue at all. We are the sick ones, overstimulated with shiny distractions grabbing our attention at all moments, and the fact that we are unable to deal with the mundane is a disease of our own soul. Personally, I do not put myself above this, as I am to a high degree a product of my time, but I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?

But we're not all that special, as ours is not the first age where boredom is demonized. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman talks about how much of violent ideologies from the wrong side of World War II drank from the Romantic fountain that urged for people not to be bored. "Better barbarism than boredom," as 19th century French poet Théophile Gautier put it. Hitting a little closer to my point, "Everything is always the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing ever happens, absolutely nothing... If someone would only begin a war, it need not be a just one", wrote Georg Heym, a German Youth Expressionist poet.

I imagine people expect to read about the yakuza and find out about gang violence, tortures, tattoos to mark one another, but that's far from it. They were a business with a code that could almost be translated to our times as a contract. All the violence you see in the book is either a) from the government authorities and the police or b) in self-defence. These people were not troublemakers. In fact they avoided trouble at all costs and, when it did happen inevitably as consequence of our human nature, they did their best to comply and cooperate with authorities, even if they were to be basically tortured, as was Mr. Ichiji's case.

A lot of people who realize the modern distractions tend to idealize the lives of the past, often ignoring that, as Dylan put it, those weren't consequences of their dreams and hopes, as most of our lives isn't. Dreams and hopes have a place, they let us not just let life pass by our eyes and actively call us to live, but they're not the end-all be-all. There goes Dylan again on "Floater", and again robbing Saga/Ichiji:

The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
In bad times with the younger men
But old, young, age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end
One of the boss' hangers-on
Comes to call at times you least expect
Try to bully ya—strong arm you—inspire you with fear
It has the opposite effect

I guess all generations are going to have their own conflict of visions, and thankfully people like Saga and Dylan, with their care for popular history and, of course, their own tradition, save us some time making us realize with their art things we could spend our whole lives trying to crack.

What is to chatter? It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. Chattering gets ahead of essential speaking, and giving utterance to reflection has a weakening effect on action by getting ahead of it. But the person who can speak essentially because he is able to keep silent will not have a profusion of things to speak about but one thing only, and he will find time to speak and to keep silent.

— Soren Kierkegaard

Probably the biggest lesson I've learned in the last three years was to appreciate what you already have even if you aspire more. It is true that things could be better, but they could be one hell of a lot worse. And the one practical advice I can give, far from original, might be that you will not find solutions, but only trade-offs at most.

Earlier this month I watched a video by a Brazilian guy, who clearly wasn't anywhere near rich, though not particularly poor either, and he was comparing the lives of those in high and low income areas, according both to what he remembered from childhood and what he was seeing in his early 30s. His conclusion was that richer people tend to be more silent, and poor people tended to be scandalous, always partying because they supposedly wanted to show the world how happy they are. But is that really happiness?

On one hand, it was just one more example of something I'd already thought about — whenever we're resentful about something, we try very hard to prove others everything's actually fine and dandy. But of course it isn't, or else we wouldn't be trying to prove it so hard. However, on another hand it also shows that people don't know how to deal with silence. Blaise Pascal has said that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" and I think that might be onto something.

My last two years have been very silent. It was at times excruciating being by myself thinking about possibilities that could only fall down from heaven (and at times did!) without seeing any doors to move on. At the same time it was the opportunity I needed to give up on much of my own moralism, greed and pride and actually evaluate myself as someone who shouldn't be taken too seriously. Anger I used to have towards myself would reflect in my reaction to the external world, and the more I got stripped down of this false perception, the more tolerant I became. It gets to a point where you get more patient with other people's mistakes because you know that you yourself either could make them or do even worse.

It's in silence that I found out who I really am and learned to both forgive myself and forgive others. I learned to appreciate the "miracle of the mundane", as Jordan Peterson recently put in his most recent interview on Lex Fridman, by realizing how worse things could be. Why complain about something I don't have and probably cannot have for the moment when there are things that I do have and do come in handy? Because I over focused on what was wrong, I was blind to all the precious gems and nuggets that I took for granted. Not everything needs to be perfect all the time, and when you really think about it, much of what we already have is nothing short of miraculous.

Recently, with the help of a friend, I noticed that although it didn't made itself manifest in a material way, all I had was greed and pride. Did I really deserve whatever else I did not have instead of what I did have? Should I really want more and more and more without ever giving in? Did I really have to be so decided in not bargaining a few trade-offs with my own destiny? Do I really deserve more? What do I do to deserve more? Who judges if I do deserve more or less? Me? Isn't that a bit biased? Maybe the opposite of greed is to appreciate what you have when you have it, even if things aren't perfect. Thinking you deserve more is a lie. We all have exactly what we planted in the past.

And that's what I found in silence. You may find, along with all of that, a lot of melancholia too. Actually, melancholia might be the single thing you wanted to avoid listening to with all that noise and all those distractions. What nobody tells you is that she's a good companion, ironically. You may feel lonesome at times, but because you gave melancholia an opportunity to show herself, she ironically becomes your pal in these moments. Give her a chance.

I remember being confronted with bishop Robert Barron's take on "Like a Rolling Stone" for the first time. Over ten years ago (I'm getting old!) one of my web friends sent a video of his on the subject and, unlike most of what I'd heard about the song, he gave an unique perspective. Usually, it's read as beating a dead horse — oh, Miss Lonely!, why would you commit the worst of sins, destroying and betraying yourself for nothing? But what if the message in synthesized in the line "when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose"? Does it not imply a rebirth from the ashes? How does it feel?

Norm Macdonald talks a little about this in the practical context of betting, both in casinos or in sports, saying he's never felt more free than after losing everything, and he once ended up losing 400000 dollars in one go (I invite you to count the number of zeros). He realized his life had to reboot and he went out to have a coffee, contemplating he had a new path to carve. Though I never came close to losing that much money, I've lost some in the past, though it wasn't nearly as drastic. It's awful, horrible, but if you're willing to take a look at the doors that open and perspectives that start manifesting, you probably learn something to take through life.

If "Like a Rolling Stone" is more aggressive in its hopeful truth-telling idea of being free from your shackles, its B-side is a softer, gentler version of this nadir. "Queen Jane Approximately could be a direct continuation, and even suggests Miss Lonely a solution — Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.

If you just pay attention, you'll find things you should appreciate more and you'll see people willing to help.

Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain
And all of your children start to resent you
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned
Have died in battles or in vain
And you're sick of all this repetition
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Now when all the bandits that you turned your other cheek to
All lay down their bandanas and complain
And you want somebody you don't have to speak to
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Happy 2025, friends! :)