In town I returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts. After much debate, and anxious counsel with our newly acquire friends, we had decided on the bold move of giving a general entertainment. To attack society collectively, when one’s means of approach are limited to a few acquaintances, is like advancing into a strange country with an insufficient number of scouts; but such rash tactics have sometimes led to brilliant victories, and Randolph has determined to put our fate to the touch. Expensive music and tableaux vivants are two baits most likely to attract the desired prey, and after prolonged negotiations, and the kind of wire pulling which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the distinguished portrait painter, Hans von Aachen, had been prevailed upon to organize.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 9

Cyclothymia is an illness of the blood, as the word itself tells us—cyclo-thymia, the cycling of thymos. Thymos is the blood soul—body and psychic vitality untied. In the Greek World, thymos was the generator of motion or agitation, that which roused a man to action, and was customarily the abode of joy, pleasure, love, sympathy, and anger. Greek writing sometimes referred to thymos as the raging and boiling of the blood. Said to be in the lungs as the vapor of the liquid of the blood, thymos is a commingling of blood as vitality and breath as psyche. Thymos is active and throbs, beats, quivers, pants, and moves rhythmically. Many common place expressions show the quality of thymos—to pant with eagerness, gasp with astonishment, snow with indignation, sob with grief, sigh with sadness.  #RyanPhillippe 2 of 9

Blood soul cannot be seen by the hematologist. Like psyche or soul, thymos is not a substance, but neither is it a viewpoint towards things. It carries less the sense of reflection and mirroring, less the imagining of soul, and more the sense of enactment. Thymos as enactment brings soul into action; it concerns the action of the soul of the World in relation to the individual soul. Thymos impels a way of acting in the World rather than a way of reflecting the World; acting with beauty in relation to the soul of the World which reveals itself as beautiful. Cyclothymia is then an illness of the rhythm of feelings, which require beauty in order to act. What is the matter in cyclothymia is the absence of beauty, resulting in the mood cycles of depression, a turning inward toward individual soul, and nervous excitability, a turning outward to act in soul seeking soul, but finding none. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 9

While it has been normalized so that no one is any longer diagnosed with Cyclothymia, it nevertheless constitutes a deep malaise of our culture. Nearly daily now, there are newspaper reports of unexplainable violence—quiet, reflective young men suddenly turning into mass murders, like the nice man next door who has twenty bodies stashed in his cellar. In the broad cultural sphere the situation is similar—the Cyclothymia of the stock market, cycles of terrorism followed by quiet as if it did not exist, all the swinging of mood and the inescapable nearness of violence. When the soul of the World is diminished, the soul of the individual does not know how to act, it does not experience a setting for its action, and thus explodes all at one. Since Cyclothymia concerns the inability of soul to act because it faces a World seemingly devoid of soul, it might be of benefit to consider the character of soul action, the dramatic character of soul; this in turn may help us recover the action of soul in the World. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 9

Drama and the structure of dreams are very similar to dramatic action. Dramatic structure—statement of place, dramatis personae, exposition, development of plot, culmination or crisis, solution or lysis—and dreams also imitate this structure. Since in fact dreams seldom if ever follow such a structure, what are we at? We are led to the drama of dream by virtue of the fact that the persons and events of dreams are most often partly presentations of persons and events from waking life, what would be called real, and yet partly imaginal figures—the characters of dreams act unlike they act and present themselves in waking life. So dream characters, the individual presentations of soul in dreams, are like stage actors who simultaneously real people and imaginal figures.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 9

The very essence of dramatic figures is such that there is no way to get behind their manifestations. We understand them through their action, through the agony of their tension and movement in relation to each other. Now, it that ambiguity is characteristic of the presentations of the individual soul, so also does it characterize the presentation of the soul of the World; what is real is also imagine, and the real and the imaginal are inseparable.  The word you threw behind when you left has rippled the serenity and brought about some mysterious dream to my heart. When the imaginal aspect of the World can no longer be recognized, when the soul of the World becomes repressed so that everything is taken as literal, that is, as being without soul, then the individual soul erupts violently into a World unable to meet its force with counterforce. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 9

Sincere friendship links the open hearts, it gives out the sweet tenderness. I fancy that I would make up a humorous story to crack a four-years joke on you, but I am afraid to spoil the clean Summer. Please forgive me. Now we get just a little closer to the suffering of Cyclothmymia by pointing to the agony included in those moments of being torn apart and tearing others apart. Happiness is not hidden in the satiation but in the yearning. I always ask you how far it is from the eyes to the heart. What is it that occurs in this agony, so quickly covered over with good-heartedness, so easily rationalized as just another family argument, a misunderstanding between a man and wife, a bad day at the office, but yet leading perhaps to violence?  #RyanPhillippe 7 of 9

The temper flare-up of the cyclothymic may be more like a cosmic flare-up than a simple temper tantrum. I want to also suggest that the Cyclothymic wants to act with soul in a World with soul, but is prevented from acting by a gap that is filled in either of two ways: violence is one way, and now I want to introduce another, addictions. In order to see more clearly the seething cauldron of violence brewing in the World, it is first necessary to see through addiction.  The individual in present society—passive, lost, condemned to a state of consumerism—nevertheless feels that there is something within him that can become a creating force in the World. Such a feeling can initiate a transformative process, a movement into soul, a perceiving of the World as a soul. The only secret is the persistent ability to use the Law, and the determination to continue to use it until we prove it. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 9

You are the light of the World. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light sine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in Heaven. Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until Heaven and Earth disappears, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.  #RyanPhillippe 9 of 9