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Memores acti prudentes futuri


You're unsure if I am a loose end or a strand
that waits for you to mend or understand
A few words
"When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness."
~ D.H. Lawrence

"Is the meaning of life defined by its duration? Or does life have a purpose so large that it doesn't have to be prolonged at any cost to preserve its meaning?"

"Living is not good, but living well. The wise man, therefore, lives as well as he should, not as long as he can... He will always think of life in terms of quality not quantity... Dying early or late is of no relevance, dying well or ill is... even if it is true that while there is life there is hope, life is not to be bought at any cost."
~ Seneca

"People will tell you nothing matters, the whole world's about to end soon anyway. Those people are looking at life the wrong way. I mean, things don't need to last forever to be perfect."
~ Daydream Nation

"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories-- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."
~ The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

"The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road."
~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."
~ William Blake
TICoSME
Musicalities!
Online Radio
Soma.fm

More Fun Shtuff
Newgrounds Audio Portal
Pandora
SoundClick
Kill that boredom!
Binder Paper Comics

Web Comics and Such
A Distant Soil (Some nudity)
The Adventures of Gyno-Star (Some explicit stuff)
Aquapunk
Axe Cop
Basic Instructions
Bear Nuts
Beeserker

Blue Milk Special
Bug
Buttersafe
ChannelATE
Cigarro & Cerveja
Crunchy Bunches

Curia Regis
Cyanide and Happiness
dead winter (has some explicit stuff)
Devilbear: The Grimoires of Bearalzebub (PG-13?)
Diesel Sweeties
DUBBLEBABY
Eat That Toast!
E-merl.com
The End
Evil Diva
Evil Inc.
Existential Comics
The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon
For Lack of a Better Comic
Forming (Explicit)

Girls with Slingshots (some explicit stuff...?)
Mirror
The Last Halloween
Last Train to Old Town
L.A.W.L.S.
The League of Evil Genius

Legend of Bill
Living With Insanity (some nudity)
Love Me Nice
Married to the Sea
Meaty Yogurt
Medium Large
The Meek
Metacarpolis
Monsterhood
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The Moon Prince
Moth (Some nudity)
Mr. Lovenstein
Muddlers Beat

Natalie Dee
Nedroid
The Non-Adventures of Wonderella
Optipess
Out There
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The Property of Hate
Red Meat
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Rosscott, Inc.
Safely Endangered
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Stand Still. Stay Silent
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Two Guys and Guy

Wilde Life
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xkcd
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Chain Bear (Some explicit stuff)
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Conspiracy Friends!
Daisy is Dead
Distillum
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Edemia
Edmund Finney's Quest to Find the Meaning of Life
A Fine Example
Finn and Charlie are HITCHED
Floodmud
Freaks!

Green Wake
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Lovecraft is Missing

Manta-man
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Minimalism Sucks
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Moe
Moon Town
The Nerds of Paradise
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Mirror
Ugly Girl
YU + ME
2815 Monument

Pure Flash Awesomeness
Aardvardkbutter.com
Angry Alien
Die Anstalt : Toy Psychiatry
The Frown
Hoogerbrugge

Other
Bogleech
Clients from Hell
Brian Despain
Creatures in My Head
Damn You Auto Correct!
Jhonen Vasquez's site
Overheard in New York
Passive Aggressive Notes
Submarinechannel.com
Superdickery
UHpinions
Whirled
Stories of loss
Friday, January 16, 2015
I'm pretty sure I've posted this song before, but I heard it on the radio a couple days ago and was sort of swept up in nostalgia.


I can say the most wonderful words you just don�t understand
I can show you the way but I know that you�ll never be there
All the time, all the shine of your eyes, I will never forget
All I know, there�s no time, there�s no life, there is no turning back
There is no turning back
There is no turning back


---

I was talking to Sean about love and came across this article about a study done at Yale about selfless love. The gist of it is that romantic love activates the same reward areas of the brain as cocaine, while selfless love (defined as "a deep and genuine wish for the happiness of others without expectation of reward") turns off those areas. You can love someone without having a craving for them necessarily.

This came up because I told him about a man I met whose wife of many years was leaving him to become a Buddhist nun. When I first heard his story I was shocked. It seemed incredibly tragic to me, to commit your life to someone only to have them decide they didn't want you anymore. The man seemed unfazed, though. Perhaps it had been a long time coming and he'd become desensitized to the fear of losing her. Or perhaps he'd always known she might do that, and he'd accepted that risk before they married. I don't know. In any case I feel like I can empathize with him much more now. His wife wasn't becoming a nun to escape him, it was just what she wanted to do. And he didn't want to stand in the way of her wish. At least by the time I talked to him, he had accepted it.

Anyway, I told this to Sean, with the explanation that I think, if I were in the same situation, I would probably be the same way. To marry someone I think I would have to truly love them, and if I truly loved the person I would not stand in the way of their true desire... because even if I could make them stay, I don't think it could ever be meaningful if being with me was not what they really wanted.

After I said all that, Sean said he thought I'm "one of the most mature and logical people I've met in my life." I don't know if I necessarily agree with that assessment, though. I feel it's to a great extent a matter of the values I have (although I guess you could argue that the values one holds are related to one's maturity). I value authenticity and agency and selfless love. How could I be happy if I was willfully preventing a person I loved from following their authentic wishes? I think it's better to be alone than to call repression love.

One of my favorite books when I was younger was I Am Morgan le Fay by Nancy Springer. I've forgotten most of the story by now, but I've thought about one part of the story somewhat frequently over the years.

Morgan le Fay gives forth a sending for Thomas, a magical summoning he cannot resist. They haven't seen each other for years, but she wants to be reunited. She tells her servants to make Caer Morgana, her domain, a paradise for Thomas, and that she wants it to be a stronghold within which he will always be safe from harm. She says "I love him truly; I have loved him since I was a child. And this one love of my life I will keep forever safe from harm." Thomas does come to her, wounded from battle and weary, and she heals him, and for awhile they're happy together, until one day he tries to go for a walk on the moor and finds out that she's constructed invisible walls all around her land to keep intruders out and protect him. She tells him that if he ever wants to go out all he needs to do is ask her, and she'll accompany him through the walls, but he feels disturbed by this lack of freedom. One day he asks her to let him go out and ride alone along the sea, but she refuses his request because she is afraid of him leaving her. More and more he feels like a prisoner, and he begs her to let him leave the safety of Caer Morgana. When she was a child, her father left for battle and was killed, and she fears Thomas may never return if he goes, so she tells him that she can't let him go. He is, of course, incredibly distraught, and he ends up tricking her and removing the ring which channels her power. As soon as he does so, Caer Morgana disintegrates, and some enemy knights who were riding nearby charge toward Thomas and kill him.

I read this book when I was in elementary school and that part hasn't left me in the more than ten years since. To me I guess it's sort of a horror story about the worst possible consequences of loving selfishly and detracting from someone's agency as a person. This theme is present in a lot of other stories, I think. Trying to hold onto someone too tightly may drive them away, especially if your goal to keep them conflicts with their ability to follow their authentic desires.

The real difficulty, I think, once you get past selfishness, is knowing what someone's authentic desire is. I don't agree with being completely fine with everything someone does and chalking that up to letting them be authentic, so being able to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic behavior is important. People are not static, so it's very hard to know what is authentic, but I feel like relative constancy matters. Desires often change with mood, but if you have a desire that persists regardless of your current mood, I think it has more weight as an authentic desire. This isn't something that I've completely fleshed out as an idea though, so it's possible there are loads of flaws in my thinking here that I'm not addressing.

I feel like I always start thinking about these things late at night when I have stuff to do in the morning of the next day... -Sigh-
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