I Am Grateful For All Those Dark

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

I Think To The Degree Writers Are Serious, There Is A Greater Tendency For Them To Write To Themselves, Because They're Trying To Compose Their Own Thoughts. They Are Trying To Find Out What Is In Their Minds, Which Is The Great Mystery. Finding Out Who You Are, What Is In Your Head, And What Kind Of Companion You Are To Yourself In The Course Of Life. I Do Think People Have Very Profound Lives Of Which They Say Virtually Nothing.

To Recognize Our Bias Toward Error Should Teach Us Modesty And Reflection, And To Forgive It Should Help Us Avoid The Inhumanity Of Thinking We Ourselves Are Not As Fallible As Those Who, In Any Instance, Seem Most At Fault. Science Can Give Us Knowledge, But It Cannot Give Us Wisdom. Nor Can Religion, Until It Puts Aside Nonsense And Distraction And Becomes Itself Again.

The Force Behind The Movement Of Time Is A Mourning That Will Not Be Comforted. That Is Why The First Event Is Known To Have Been An Expulsion, And The Last Is Hoped To Be A Reconciliation And Return. So Memory Pulls Us Forward, So Prophecy Is Only Brilliant Memory - There Will Be A Garden Where All Of Us As One Child Will Sleep In Our Mother Eve, Hooped In Her Ribs And Staved By Her Spine.

Vision Sometimes Comes In A Memory.