aphorism87 debate inmendham To always be in a state of optimism can never be the opulent background required of compassion, much less self-compassion. The ability to be compassionate towards others is peculiar to one who is conscious not of simply having experienced a common misfortune, but for a moment having fallen from grace. Thus, in the boredom of my grace, boredom- because I cannot fall from a world, do I ask myself: do I still have eyes? Yea, I am Oxylus; this is my mule. Look at his two eyes, they are named pity and longing, and my single eye is named hope. Here I stand amidst the frozen vegetation and the bleak air, of the north, who is named hopeless; whose air licks at the ears of my mule: from all sides it is howling, threatening, shrieking at me. Suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before me a great northern bear, walking cautiously in the silence. What? Has all the halycon and contemplation of the world embarked here? Is my self-pity itself sitting in this quiet place- my self, completely released to the spirit of this north, my injured self, my second, therein immortalized self? Not yet to be dead, but also no longer alive? As a testing, spiritlike, gliding and intermediate being? As though I were that bear that moves over the pale north with its white coat, like an enormous moth into the sun! Why do these northern airs, these dead winds also bring on a poetical mood and the inventive pleasure of verses? Are they not the same winds that fill the museums? Is it not the same dead and polar wind out of which sons and daughters speak, and give unto mothers and fathers the feeling of nostalgia? In this cruel solitude, in this northern land, I have learned that all beautiful women, all noble bodies, if they are beautiful beyond words, make us place delight in taciturnity and reservation: for all our words to them betray our shortcomings, our wounds. The woman confuses her sense of pity and sense of curiosity, and calls this love; for though a man may bring her to tears with his confessions, the law of her love is yet ardeat ipsa licet, tormentis gaudet amantis. To illicit genuine commiseration in a woman, this is impossible if she is in love with you. Pity is her pax Cererem nutrim, curiousity her pacis alumna Ceres. Ah, but this is a man's greatest snare and Trojan stupidity. Conversely, when a man stands in the midst of his own beauty, in the midst of his own north of taciturnity and reservation, he is likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for- his mistakes, his wounds, his shortcomings. That is self-compassion. After all, to be more than you have become- is that anything more than a broken, a choked and suffocated heart? To be the cito maturum of thy own cito putridum? Not to experience this yearning? Yet, even with this yearning, man almost believes that his greater self lives there amongst the shortcomings, the humiliations, the injuries: in these quiet regions even the fiercest air, even the howling air, turns into deathly silence, and in the most remote northern regions, where you will find the white bear, youth itself turns into a dream of youth. Yet even for the most beautiful and gliding bear, there is so much howling and screaming of the wind, and unfortunately so disinterested, bored wind! The magic and the most powerful self-compassion, the most gracious effect of our shortcomings is, so to speak, reccedant vetera: but that first requires age! And age will forgive us even of our haec olim meminisse juvabit in our shortcomings, mistakes, wounds: Cui respondit intuens rotae, volubilitatem in qua mox summa max ima funt, cogito de nostra fortuna. Infini enim animi est, hominis parum sibi constantis, qui perpetuum vitae tenorem somniet.. [Edinus Cyriacus in Momos et artium liberalium mastygas] 090505 what's it to you? who go blather from