At some point, even the greatest misery begins to fade. Life, or what passes for life, plods on in it's own unending weary footsteps, and somehow we plod along with it, if we stay lucky.
Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London _ __here__ probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life._ _ The word that offends against realism here is __njoy._ I__ sorry__njoy your life? Enjoy your_life? I__ not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is_one_emotion _ Only sometimes, when you__e being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what__ happening to you where you__l gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you__l be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion _ This really is a bizarre category error.But not necessarily an innocent one _ The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren__ being __orried_ by us believer _ Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What__ so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? _ Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you__e that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You__e never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you__l be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won__ rescue you. Or suppose you__e that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat__ nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you__e back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you__e fucked up big time. Always before you__e had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn__ true, now you know you haven__ the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you__l be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won__ ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame.So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there__ probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it__ true, is that anyone who isn__ enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you__e all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there__ no help coming _ But let__ be clear about the emotional logic of the bus__ message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing __ruel optimism_ fifteen hundred years ago, and it__ still cruel.
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Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London _ __here__ probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life._ _ The word that offends against realism here is __njoy._ I__ sorry__njoy your life? Enjoy your_life? I__ not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is_one_emotion _ Only sometimes, when you__e being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what__ happening to you where you__l gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you__l be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion _ This really is a bizarre category error.But not necessarily an innocent one _ The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren__ being __orried_ by us believer _ Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What__ so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? _ Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you__e that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You__e never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you__l be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won__ rescue you. Or suppose you__e that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat__ nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you__e back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you__e fucked up big time. Always before you__e had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn__ true, now you know you haven__ the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you__l be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won__ ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame.So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there__ probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it__ true, is that anyone who isn__ enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you__e all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there__ no help coming _ But let__ be clear about the emotional logic of the bus__ message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing __ruel optimism_ fifteen hundred years ago, and it__ still cruel.
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In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.
I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest__his was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.
A ten-year-old Amanda wandering around the sights and sounds of a carnival. Trying to take it all in as such an event was much larger than the backroads of isolated territory from whence she grew up. She could not imagine this many people assembled in one place. It was made more disturbing by the fact none of them seemed familiar. Short for her age, she wandered unnoticed among the crowds and began to feel the first stirrings of fear. The loud talk, the screaming children, the long lines of procession, along with the myriads of odors created a miasma that she wanted to flee. The laughter and the faux expressions of joy on the faces of people, took on the maroon tones of a nightmare. She could imagine underneath the laughter, were horrid screams about to erupt.
and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.