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One Moment Lived—is a Life
Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untampered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition. How happy would it be for mankind, could they behold their foibles and vices with the piercing eyes that others can. There is nothing upon Earth I hate like a joke. A criminal conspiracy is an agreement between persons to break the law in the future, in some cases having committed an act to further that agreement.
As Love Enters Fear Vanishes
Make ambition your business and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, and you will succeed. So impish are the ways of the gods. I do not flatter myself that my coming has deflected your course of action by a hair’s breadth. You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today. It is part of your cleverness to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously. I will fear no evil, for I know that the Great Judge of all controls my every act.
Your words are too acute not to strike my sense of humor. It is true that you mean to use the accident of my presence as part of a very definite effect; or that, at least, it was the secret pretext you found for breaking your promise to talk to Mrs. Reese. She had sometimes been accused of being too eager—even Ava had warned her to go slowly. Well, she would not be too eager in this case; she would give us a longer taste of suspense. Where duty and inclination jumped together, it was not in Mrs. Reese to hold them asunder. Let every fear of people be removed from me and let the silence of my mind bear witness to the truth.
I do not know why you are always accusing me of premeditation. If you mean that I have no one to think for me, I am obliged to think for myself, I am quite willing to accept the imputation. However, you must find me a dismal kind of person if you suppose that I never yield to an impulse. My genius? Is there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly have not succeeded, yet. It is only a miracle as everything else in life is a miracle. A definite, conscious idea has been set in motion in the Subjective World, which accepts ideas at their own valuation and tends to act upon them.
From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that is what I call success. I know—I know it is strange; but that is just what I have been feeling today. You think me horribly sordid, do you not? However, perhaps it is rather that I never had any choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the mind. To despair of success, is to prevent our succeeding.
Somewhere in the back of my conscious was taking shape the horrid realization that a modern-minded fledgling was as complex as a nuclear reactor, a communications satellite, an intel Pentium 14 computer, a microwave oven, Deedle, a cell phone and all the other intricate overarching newfangled creations I could not understand. Of course, it was all a matter of exploding sophistication. Or mystification.
Of all human dealings, satire is the very lowest, and most men and common It is the equivalent in words for what bullying is in deeds; and no more bespeaks a clever man, than the other does a brave one. It is astonishing with what avidity we look for the application of satire which is general, and never a prototype. The thoughts of the tomorrows and the yesterdays are swallowed up in the great realization of the perfect here and the complete now. Today, I completely accept my wholeness.
Out of the darkness of the long night the dawn has come. Phillippe Manor was lit up like a lantern in the rural dark, doors thrown open on the front porch, floodlights on, I rise to meet the new day, filled with confidence and strength. I arise and go forth into the dawn, inspired and refreshed by the living spirit within me. Oh day, you shall never die; the Sun shall never set upon your perfect glory.
The lamp of the life has been re-kindled with the oil of faith, and love has cleansed the windows of life with the spirit of gladness. They shall nevermore grow dim with fear, for perfect love casteth out all fear. I am renewed in strength through knowing good. My light has come. I have no doubts nor uncertainties My faith in the power of God is supreme. Commit yourself to the current of the World. Nothing is more common than to call our own condition the condition of life. As love enters, fear vanishes. Life is a game of calculation; and he that plays the best of t is the cleverest fellow.
My Empire is of the Imagination
Affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a nature lover’s trait. Never think of anything until you have first asked yourself if there is an absolute necessity for doing it, at that particular moment. Thinking of things, when things need not be thought of, is offering an opportunity to Worry; and Worry is the favorite agent of Death when the destroyer handles his work in a lingering way, and achieves premature results.
Never look back, and never look forward, as long as you can possibly help it. Looking back leads the way to sorrow. And looking forward ends in the cruelest of all delusions: it encourages hope. The present time is the precious time. Live for the passing day: the passing day is all that we can be sure of.
Your mind sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall awaken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristing not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base.
However, I tell you—you will come some day to a craggy pass of the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master wave into a calmer current.
It is one of my rules in life never to notice what I do not understand. Life is like plumcakes. In some the plums are all on the top, and we eat them gaily, till we suddenly find they are gone. In others the plums sink to the bottom, and we look for them in vain as we go on, and often comes to them when it is too late to enjoy them. However, in the well-made cake, the plums are wisely scattered all through, and every mouthful is a pleasure. We make our own cakes, in a great measure.
There is a class of spectators whose sympathy will help them to see the perfect through a mist of imperfections. Nobody ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
Their highest merit is suggestiveness. There is reason to suspect that people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life becomes fascinating either in the poet’s imagination or the painter’s eye.
It is an age so full of light, that there is scarce a country or corner of Europe, whose beams are not crossed and interchanged with others. Many of us would read in the stars, if we could, something hidden from us; but of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence—and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered. Every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it.
Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. In natural science there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into still subtler form. Favorable circumstances—good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly adhered to—keep the World out of Bedlam. However, let the World fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam its safest abode? The play of imagination, in the romance of early youth, is rarely interrupted with scruples of probability.
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire. Many people have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:–reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream.
There is Romance in Every Life
The wisdom of Love, the highest wisdom ever known upon this Earth, a face engraved with a hostile beauty. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves, on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom. A wise man is never dejected at a disappointment, and often turns a misfortune to his advantage in the end. Perfection is always found in maturity, whether it be in the animal or in the intellectual World. Reflection is the mother of wisdom, and wisdom the parent of success. To act right simply because it is one’s duty is proper; but a good action which is the result of no law of reflection shines more than any! To preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we must inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing activity of the head. Men seldom risk their lives where an escape is without hope of recompense.
Man must ever be the slave of routine; but in the old days, it was a routine of great thoughts, and now it is a routine of little words. Poor, blind, conceited humanity! Interpreters of God, indeed! We reduce the Deity to vulgar fractions. We measure infinity with a foot-rule. I am not laughing at any man’s religion. Let them follow their consciences, that is all! Only I think it would be better if their consciences would let them stay quiet in the church—there is a deal to be learnt there. And there is such a thing as being oversperitial; we must have something besides Gospel in this World. If prudence consists in wishing well to oneself, young flirts are as prudent as antiquated loves. There is no worse place to starve than in Paris. The appearances of life are there so especially gay, it is so much a magnified beer-garden, the houses are so ornate, the theatres so numerous, the very pace of the vehicles is so brisk, that a man in any deep concern of mind or pain of body is constantly driven in upon himself. To other eyes than ours, evil may be good, and darkness more beautiful than day, or all alike be fair. “Remember the former age, for I am God, and there is no God beside, neither is there the like to me.” Ps 46:9
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House was reported to be haunted by evil spirits. Dreadful noises were heard; and flames were seen, by night, to issue from various apertures. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Mortal Antipathy
People seldom commit sin without intending to derive benefit from it. He or she that loves, and is loved by, a race of pure and virtuous creatures, and that lives continually in the midst of them, is an idiot if one does not think oneself happy.
However, who knows what the justice of Heaven may inflict in order to convince us that we are not out of the reach of misfortune; and to reduce us to a better reliance, than that we have hitherto presumptuously made? People need to rise early, to see the Sun, in all splendor, for his brightness seldom last the day through. The morning of day and the morning of life are but too much alike.
When a man or woman thinks of anything which is past, one looks down upon the ground, but when one thinks of something that is to come, one looks up towards the Heavens. Why are so many of you looking at the ground? Why waste the present gossiping and stirring up old myths, as if they are current events?
Learn to celebrate success and move on. Tomorrow is not promised, and instead of living, you are wasting your time making yourself and others miserable. Nothing is more common than to call our own condition the condition of life.
There is no such thing as moral responsibility for past acts, no such thing as real justice in punishing them, for the reason that human beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same.
Therefore justice, whose only possible mode of proceeding is to punish in present time for what is done in past time, must always punish a person more or less similar to, but never identical with, the one who committed the offense, and therein must be no justice.
There are some who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day toward this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the World.
Players are heroes upon the stage; but beggars, sots, or prostitutes in their private lodgings. So many celebrities claims to care about things like Civil Rights and “Free West Papua,” but behind closed doors many of them are heathens, who use and abuse people and have egos so large that they cannot see anything wrong with their behavior.
Their minds are like the misbegotten of Hell. They have been swaggering through eternity for a four or five decades at the most, just long enough to make them very cocky. They are greedy filth. However, a few stars, like Paris Hilton are actually very caring, she donates money to rural counties and feeds starving children.
Therefore, keep in mind, every moment of time solicits to be employed in the important business of love. Love is the heart of harmony, the connecting chain that links the whole frame of being; it is the glory of nature, and the very perfection of human kind.
Still, I cannot tell my own heart what I am feeling now, how much I crave this little battle. I cannot find the words, it is so raw, so rooted inside me! From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.
As love knoweth no laws, so it regardeth no conditions. When any one of our relations was found to be a person of very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house I ever took care to lend him a riding-coat or a pair of boots, or sometimes a horse of value, and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them. Love is a poison and by poison must be maintained. A risk, when you love someone, is worth taking.
Time of Conflict
The modern Master of Chemistry promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted ad that the elixir of life is a chimera. However, these philosophers whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how one works in one’s hiding place. They ascend into the Heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of Heaven, mimic the Earthquake, and even mock the invisible World with its own shadows. A secret is always accompanied by more or less of fear, and produces more or less of cowardice. When Gold Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. The Holy Scriptures impart to us knowledge and assurance of things much more worthy our attention than all which this World can offer to our acceptance; of things which Heaven itself hath condescended to reveal to us, and to the smallest knowledge of which the highest human wit unassisted could never ascend. The discovery of a secret implies no obligation to retain it.
There is a rebellious soul in things which must be overcome by powerful charms and incantations. When the human—the physical—system is put under the effect of an excessive stimulant, whether grape, opium, or poison, taken in a quantity not sufficient to produce death, there is for a time, an unnatural exaltation, a tremendous accession of velocity in all the wheels of life. Whatever may be the evils resulting from a too susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an insensible one. A man without sensibility exhibits no sign of a soul. Nothing renders the soul so callous and insensible as the searing brands of infamy and disgrace. The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again. It seems that human beings compounded especially for happiness have no longer any business on Earth, or elsewhere. Life has grown so sadly serious, that such must change their nature, or else perish, like the antediluvian creatures, that required, as the condition of their existence, a more summer-like atmosphere than ours. The increasing seriousness of things—the great opportunity of jokes, there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late. Who can part, forever; only when we come so close that nothing separates us can we meet again, only when what binds us is not my need of your or your need of me nor any chance circumstance, but a deep ingrained likeness of nature that cannot pass away.
The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Sometimes no matter how hard some people try, no matter how hard they work, they cannot seem to help themselves. Frequently do we labor to secure the things that debase us into slaves, and overwhelm us with calamity. Great men will take advantage of those who need help to advance their own causes. Trying to build a reputation and create a career, a man found that people just expected and exploited his work for their benefit, giving him nothing in return. His honorable efforts just seem to produce more threats and exploitation. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. Sincerity is the true knight. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye. There would hardly be a guilty person in the World, were each suspected or accused person to tell his or her own story and be allowed any degree of credit. There is nothing more terrible to a guilty heart, than the eye of a respected friend. Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this World. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve? There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
The Winchester Mystery House
A small girl in Victorian dress is often seen playing among the garden at The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Our Father, Who Art in Bed—Still a Great Saint
The only reason why many cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is because we know too little of the actual past ad actual present; these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details, would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all. The control of the elemental heart, or magic, is thus an essential part of the music and poetry that are attributes of the higher nature of man.
As the action of comedy moves toward the fulfillment of love, this anti-comic society is nearly always concerned to roughen the course of true love. I want to save billions of souls, doing good far and wide. Do not become a writhing human victim because some of you look like you deserve a vampiric kiss. There are a lot of insatiable blood thieves and soul smashers, who are vengeful because we are so magnificent. I want you to share my memories and experiences, as the affinity between chastity and harmony of unfallen nature are in your orbit with hints of sexual inexperience, which absolutely makes me want my prose to envelop you.
If we pay more attention to the difference between poetic and other kinds of thought, and deal with such a word only in its specific dramatic contexts, our other and better feeling that I take sun into the very center of human wisdom and it will be justified here and now. If I could, I would drink your blood and hook you into every memory inside of me, every heartbreak, frame of reference, temporary triumph, petty defeat, success, happiness, and my mystic moment of surrender to the White Squall.
You often wonder why I put all of this information out here for the public to see? Of course, for one good reason—my obsession with producing a report to the mortal World that can be read by just about anyone. No amount of wealth and power can buy my silence for long. What if a $30 million mansion with high-gloss French furniture, art glass windows, and stone interior walls does not matter much in the grand scheme of things? You can shudder with desperation in the rooms of a palace as well as in a Victorian apartment.
I was attacked by the divine and sacramental! People talk about the gift of faith, well, I am telling you that it was more like a White Squall! It flipped me upside down, had me up to my head in water, I would not move, I was trying to push the door open and it would not go anywhere. My lungs were filling with water and I was cold as ice. It did sheer violence to my psyche. The voice at the other end of the phone was gaining speed, straining my note-taking skills, and the speaker’s heavy Tuscan accent did not make things any easier. However, what he was telling me held me spellbound.
My son seems to think he is grown and that is his body and he can do what he wants, but I know more about him than he knows. And he risks death by having sexual relations with or without a condom, so I do not want him going anywhere nor around anyone. And you all should give men some metaphysical space. We were in the vestibule of the Cathedral (where did you think I would drag you, son? Do you not want to die on consecrated ground?), and you are begging for it all the way; oops! Went too far, do not say I did not warn you.
In this situation, it is not appropriate to exercise pressure on him in one direction or another. However, my son was not finished, he did not want me to leave his room with the wrong impression—the impression that he was lacking confidence in me. He leaned in a little more closely and began defending me in no uncertain terms. My son told me I was on fleek and he sees me with fresh eyes, not projecting his anger onto me, and I immensely relieved to be so out in the open and to feel safe in doing so. That’s why I write this, I need you. I cannot breathe without you. I am helpless without you—.
It is going to all add up, I swear to you because all roads lead to me. And if you really love me, and want to understand every nuance of the history that lies ahead, I hereby invite you to go with me. You have the talent, the ideas and the means to carry me through. As I walked out of my son’s room, I realized that he was one of those important aspects of my life that would be almost impossible to report because no one would publically acknowledge. How could documents that had already seen the light of day now be hidden away again behind this archaic notion of privacy?
The Legion was asking for pretrial seizure of the documents as well as their “return” in hard copy or electronic format, the deletion from my web sites of information that derived from them and a permanent injunction against their use in the future. Although I possessed only copies of these documents and no originals, the complaint listed their “fair market value” as at least $750,000.00 USD. The suit also aimed to identify the “conspirators” who has posted information about the situation. You are always whispering in my ear, are you not? Pages of request, motions, and exhibits. This is censorship, pure and simple. And you cannot fight it.
In Spain, the young men come to my doors, clutching small statues of me in their hands, while their mothers weep before me in the Cathedral. In Sacramento, California, thousands of students file past my image pledging to have safe sex or none at all. I am invoked at the Capitol for special intercessions throughout Europe and America. In New York, a gang of scientists and engineers announced to the whole World that, thanks to my specific intercession, they have managed to make an odorless, tasteless, harmless, drug which creates the total high of crack, cocaine, and heroin combined, and which is dirt cheap, totally available and completely legal! The drug trade is forever destroyed!
The lawyers wanted between $20,000.00 to $70,000.00 as a deposit before even touching the case. I went to the first court appearance representing myself. The judge told me to get a lawyer as soon as possible, and in the meantime to hand over any of the “documents” in my possession. I found a lawyer, and in November of 2007 we appeared in court, but instead of resolving anything it only set in motion a new round of discovery and depositions. At the end of it all, my legal bill amounted to just over $1,400,000.00 USD.
Over the next several months I completed my project, and in August my four-hundred-six-page paperback went on sale. The important thing was that I was keeping public attention on a scandal the rest of the city seemed willing to quietly forget. I adorn myself with my old human personality, you might say, but I am still a great saint, and I am totally headed for an apparition. And where do I go? Where do you think? It is a perfectly understandable question. The image of God Incarnate, become Man out of fascination with His own Creation, will triumph in the Third Millennium as the supreme emblem of divine Sacrifice and Unfathomable Love.
Present, Future, and Liberty Forever on Fleek
There are some human beings born, so reared, so guided from a soft cradle to a calm and late grave, that no excessive suffering penetrates their lot, and no tempestuous blackness overcasts their journey. And often these are not pampered, selfish begins, but Nature’s elect, harmonious and benign; men and women mild with charity, kind agents of God’s kind attributes.
One would think that, as since the beginning of the World almost, the tide of emigration has been setting west, the needle would point that way; whereas, it is forever pointing its fixed forefinger toward the Pole, where there are few inducements to attract a sailor unless it be plenty of ice for mint-juleps. Mortal men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner.
Distress heightens devotion, which in prosperity is apt to grow languid. There was never a man so strong as to choose the dream when Reality cast off her shackles and beckoned. Imagination we regard as a compensation, not as the supreme gift. Good fortune is never more doubtful than when it wears the sweetest and most promising countenance.
He who reduces all beneath him to state of servitude becomes himself the slave of his establishment, and of all his domestics. In some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, each of which pursues its separate course as through it were continuous instead of broke. Thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where.
Those who have the charge of youth should watch the first attempts f dawning reason, and fix, in their youthful hearts, such sentiments of truth and honor as might defy the hand of time to efface. Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
Fear plucks the feathers from the wings of the heart and sits it naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing of a common hodman’s foot above sounds like the king of terrors coming. Fear transfers the creatures of the World and the craft of man, making that which is ugly seemly in our eyes, ad that which is beautiful, unsightly. Whom we fear more than love, we are not far from hating.
A man must earn his freedom daily, or he will become a slave in some form or another: and the way to earn it is by work and obedience to right direction. When acknowledged, love authorizes freedom; and freedom begets freedom. The triumph of a person’s intellect, the proof of his power, is to make the serpent who inhabits us fight against himself, till he is destroyed.
If the human mind is not actively good, it will generally be actively evil. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the real love and truth—in the end, stronger than any evil or misfortune. A true hearted lover forgets all trespasses, and a smile cureth the wounding of a frown.
One likes to be done well by every tense, past, present, and future. I acted as if there was no such thing as any kind love but that which tended to matrimony. Could time be reversed, and the future change places with the past, the past would cry out against us, and our future, full as loudly, as we against the ages forgone. All the Ages are his children, calling each other names. We have a rich or a barren future, just as we conceive it.
Love Leads to God through Arts or Acts
All-merciful Father, indeed! Why, the Prince of Darkness was angel in comparison (and a gentleman into the bargain). There is no knowledge in search of which people in general are more eager, than that of what others have been doing in the World.
There are people who read books to convince themselves there is a God. Like busts in marble, so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. Throughout all eternity, the parts of the past are but parts of the future reversed.
Destiny, it may be,–the most skillful of stage managers,–seldom choose to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the presence of at least one calm observer. Incidents little in human speculation are great in the eye of fortune.
Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. All things fulfill their destiny. Reassume your courage, not the courage to die, but to live. I am on another level, can you feel my flow? The God of this World is in the machine—not out of it.
Energy is perhaps of all qualities the most valuable. This was a century in which the fine arts and the higher mechanical arts were not separated by any distinct boundary, nor were those who practiced them; and it was an age in which artists sought and loved one another. I wonder if you are ever feel that zing because it should greater the temptation to supply its place by a ritual? Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
Should this last statement stagger a painter or writer of our day, let me remind him that even Christians loved one another at first starting. Civility should take leave: where nothing is due to love, something is due to good manners. I am naturally civil when I am civilly used. It always remains true that when all the ways of our unintelligible World are the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect.
For wise and good reasons, God made the knowledge of Himself scarce any otherwise attainable by us, than that of the existence of other beings absent to sense. The will is placed in the soul, and who can enter there but he that created the soul? What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
When you would understand of that great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and a resting-place in human minds—soar out the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surround these little planets, and stand erect in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere.
People who like any society better than none are, in general, those who know least how to enjoy it. When a man will give it a fair play, common sense will get the better in all cases. There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. The Angels were created from light and the Jinn from smokeless fire.
Jinn live longer than humans and can take on any form they would like: human, true, car, building. They are able to attracts a person’s great attention. Jinns possess people for several purposes. In some cases, the Jinn will alter a person’s reality because it or its family has been accidentally hurt. Nevertheless, it could be because the Jinn has fallen in love with the person.
When a man has told all he has to say, the sooner he is silent the better. A person dying in a state of great sin may be changed into a Jinn, in the period of a barzakh, separation barrier. Some say they live in the mystical emerald mountains in the celestial sphere surrounding the Earth. Some say they are pagan gods. Jinn have free will.
There was said to be a Jinn in the Garden of Eden with Adam, but he refused to submit to Adam and was expelled from Paradise and called Satan. They are usually invisible to humans, but humans do appear clearly to Jinn. Jinn have the power to travel large distances at extreme speeds and are thought to live in their own communities. The Jinn occasionally assume human form to mislead and destroy their human victims.
There is an intoxication that makes merry in the midst of affliction; and there is an intoxication that banishes affliction by producing oblivion. However, again, there is an intoxication which is conscious of itself through it makes the feet unsteady, and the voice think, and the brain foolish; and which brings neither mirth nor oblivion. A mistaken sense of duty has been the cause of quite one fourth of the unhappiness of mankind, and few have been so bigoted as not to acknowledge this when it is too late.
How shall so young a scholar, in the school of affliction, be able to bear such heavy and such various evils? A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
When it does not lead to spending money, liveliness is a pleasant thing. How will injuries never honorably complained of be believed to grieve us? There is nothing more likely to succeed with an audience than a good history of witchcraft, or something so very marvelous, as to do violence to common sense, before we give it our faith.
Life is full of the saddest and the strongest contrasts. Much more does affliction demand our love when it proceeds from compassion for another’s woes. Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the World. However, his heart assured him that love is faith, and faith is his nature.
