“There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!”
― Hermann Hesse
This quote casts me naked and vulnerable and I couldn’t be happier. So often i tire of being the wise, the talented when I know of my own idiocy and foolishness. I give advice and inwardly I mock myself in derision for am I not lost and sail in an almost constant sea of confusion? How can I be a one-eyed man when the dust has crusted my cyclopean shut? So yes i have doubts and confusion amidst the clarity and i shall never deny it. i can be largely an ignoramus tho sometimes I can tell a hacksaw from a hand grenade. But everything I see, the darkness which lies all too often in our human hearts and the occasional flashes of sunrise that light the heart from within, kindness, cruelty, and life in all its shades, I shall embrace.
Blessings, G
Stellar Romance by G A Rosenberg