The Two Houses

To live means to choose. To be born means to be born into society. To be social means to live in the world of others, both dead and still living. To live in this world means all of these things. To choose means to step into one of two houses. There is no reconciliation, there is only separation and choice. One cannot walk from one house into the other; to waver in one's deciding is to step no further than the threshold of either house. Only those who live in the house know what it means to do so; and we cannot ever know what the other would mean. Total strangers, those who live in the one house rather than the other. They cannot know each other, they cannot understand each other; they are separated by an infinite unseeing abyss. And none live outside of both, peering into the windows. Not one.

The irreconcilability of perspective, the fractures innate to existence herself.

This is my natural understanding of my circumstances; I go straight from concrete actuality to the most abstract abstraction. My second movement is to drop all abstractions and write (and say) only the facts, but this is a hopeless endeavor. As little as those foreign to myself understand the abstract generalities I express, even little can they grasp the significance the bare facts have for myself. Even expressing the bare facts of my subjective apprehension of the scenario is ineffective. What I understand by saying "I feel" shall be quite different from what another says by those same words; specificity of feeling is the most challenging thing to relate to another. We do not feel generally; our feelings are quite specific, quite unique, quite incommunicable.

The dangers of the intuitive mind which lives still within the haze of indiscernibility. Our emotions are flavored into complex recipes, frequently of disaster. Follow your heart, speak your mind; the heart has its reasons which reason does not know (Pascal), the reason has its understanding which the heart cannot penetrate. The heart does not have words to speak; it speaks in implication and misdirection. The heart has no words to speak; but fools that we are, we try to let it set our reason into motion. We should not be surprised, then, when our heart wraps our words into an irrational senselessness.

Love thyself first and highest. Honor thyself.