Second Post

I have a few problems to speak of, but I suppose I'll let them come to light as they become pertinent. This isn't, after all, a lecture series - so I feel pretty okay with taking a more freeform approach. This is more for my own edification anyway! To hell with the reader.

Despite my less than systematic intentions, it seems as easy as anything to start from the very fundamental problem that is bothering me most of all:

What is life for?

I'm no theist. I'm not religious. I don't particularly ascribe to most essential societal norms. I'm hypercritical, stubborn and ornery, independent-minded, and damn proud of it. There are a couple of problems with saying such things, however, and I do want to make note of them.

First of all, none of these things make me a bad person. I am, in my own estimation, painstakingly polite, cordial, willing to go out of my way for people, all of the stuff that, in theory, at least, makes someone likeable. My extremely critical demeanor is mainly relegated to the world of ideas, where I pick things apart, dissect them, torture them until they talk. I never treat people in the same way.

But that brings me to the second, and more pertinent, point I wanted to make about my temperament. When I take ideas apart, it becomes rather like dissecting a frog - perfectly possible and, once in pieces on the table before me, there is no doubt about how the frog worked. But once it's there, laid out for examination... it's a much more difficult job to put it back together and get it to work like it once did.

Ideas are dead to me! Mummified, long-dead rulers of some ancient kingdom. And they were worshipped as descendants of the sun god in that forgotten epoch, but now I look on their works and despair, not as a stunned traveler seeing all they accomplished, but seeing that I have to start from scratch.

I have to build a life worth living, and I don't know how.