There Are A Thousand Thousand Reasons To

I Am Delighted If People Find That Kind Of Sustenance In Novels, But Perhaps It's Because They Don't Read The Scripture That They Are Comparing It To, Which Would Perhaps Provide Deeper Sustenance Than Many Contemporary Novels.

I Am Interested In Scripture And Theology. This Is An Interest That I Can Assume I Would Share With A Pastor, So That Makes Me A Little Bit Prone To Use That Kind Of Character, Perhaps, Just At The Moment. Then There Is Also The Fact That, Having Been A Church Member For Many Years, I Am Very Aware Of How Much Pastors Enrich People's Experience, People For Whom They Are Significant. I Know That It's A Kind Of Custom Of American Literature And Culture To Slang Them. I Don't Think There Is Any Reason Why That Needs To Be Persisted In.

The Loss Of Seriousness Seems To Me To Be, In Effect, A Loss Of Hope. I Think That The Thing That Made People Rise To Real Ambition, Real Gravity Was The Sense Of Posterity, For Example - A Word That I Can Remember Hearing Quite Often When I Was A Child And I Never Hear Anymore. People Actually Wanted To Make The World Good For People In Generations That They Would Never See. It Makes People Think In Very Large Terms To Try To Liberate Women, For Example, Or To Try To Eliminate Slavery.

Of Course, Mysticism Is Very Hard To Isolate Because, Given The Kind Of Consciousness That I Was Sort Of Instructed In As Religious Consciousness; That Borders On Mysticism So Closely That It's Hard To Know Whether You Qualify Or Not, Or Whether Mysticism Is Artificially Isolated When It Is Treated As A Separate Thing From Experience. Obviously, Mysticism Can Be A Form Of Madness, But Then Consciousness Can Be A Form Of Madness.

It Was A Source Of Both Terror And Comfort To Me Then That I Often Seemed Invisible - Incompletely And Minimally Existent, In Fact. It Seemed To Me That I Made No Impact On The World, And That In Exchange I Was Privileged To Watch It Unawares.