Changes Pt. 3: The Balance Of Averages (I)

I’ve posted about Jill Bolte Taylor before (I’ll spare you and myself the embedded video and just link you to her TED talk), so imagine my satisfaction when I heard her again on this week’s new Radiolab episode, Words.

Jill is the neuroscientist who studied strokes firsthand when a blood vessel burst in her left brain hemisphere and, among myriad other complications, completely silenced her speech centers. Her guest appearance on Radiolab expands on this silence, beyond what was touched upon in her TED talk. (I haven’t made it through her book My Stroke Of Insight, but what I read just seemed to be a wordier version of the TED talk, adding a lot of verbiage but not, seemingly, adding content.) Earlier in the episode, Jad and Robert had explored how speech, it appears, is what creates complex thought. It is language’s ability to connect disparate words that allows us to start connecting disparate thoughts. I won’t go into all the details at present (you should probably listen to the episode), but the progression of thoughts is fascinating.

Without her left brain, Jill could not talk. And she could not think in any sophisticated way. Without the left brain, there is no past or future. The left and right brains make up, for us, the temporal and the eternal, the everything and I. Without the left, there is no self, and no time but the present. The left brain creates the delineation between one’s self and one’s surroundings. This is one of the things that is often shut out by intoxicants, especially hallucinogens. This is why people on mushrooms sit on the beach and become the sand, the surf, and the sunset.

Pure silence. You know, not that little voice that, you know, you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says “oh man the sun is shining.” Well imagine you that don’t hear that voice saying “man the sun is shining,” you just experience the sun and the shining.

In the episode, Robert Krulwich describes it as “the absence of reflection of any kind.”

Jad Abumrad: Did you have… thoughts?
Jill Bolte Taylor: …I had joy.

This is that time, living purely in the moment, where the sense of wonder Carl and Michael Pollan spoke of is all-consuming. Every sunrise is the first you’ve ever seen. A state of constant amazement. Perhaps this is what people seek when they take drugs, but in a pure strain I’m not sure anyone would chase quite so far down the rabbit hole. Constant amazement.

To envy this state recalls to my mind Robert Burns’ To A Mouse, which we all ate in high school before reading Of Mice And Men, where Burns says the mouse is blessed because it only knows the present, not fearing the future and forgetting the past. Pollan quotes Nietzsche’s assessment of animals’ bliss:

“They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn til night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and it’s pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored…”

“A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ – but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”

-as quoted in The Botany Of Desire, p. 163

If this is a bliss, it is a speechless one. It is an unaware bliss, one that doesn’t know anything but bliss, does not know this is bliss. It is one that cannot be shared because it is silent, and because there would be nothing to say about it.

I’d venture that we live in a very left-brained society. Pollan makes the argument several times, though not in so many words. Both Christianity and capitalism are systems that dominate this country (and much of the world), and spend much time fixating on the future (capitalism on the better tomorrow, Christianity on the next life). We don’t, as the cliché goes, “stop and smell the roses.” Not just because we’re too busy, but because we’re too familiar. We pass that rosebush every day. It hasn’t changed. How can we look at it in any new way?

I’d put money on the idea that one of the pulls towards drugs is an attempt to balance this out. To muffle the left brain and spend some time in the present, and in the quiet. Hopping towards the right.

Do we find balance this way? If we spend, say, 75% of our waking time in the left brain, then, on occasion, 90% into the right for a few hours. Is a balance of averages balance at all? Silence from the left can bring wonder, but can it bring wisdom?

I’ve sat in these thoughts since yesterday, and I would say this of my asceticism: what I want is to use the fullness of my brain in a moment. I want, without chemical assistance, to feel a moment in the present, and feel its passing. This is what I’m always working at. If wisdom is to embrace the miracle of the fleeting moment, I would have to feel the present, and be aware of how it flits from the future to the past, in and out of existence. To be of both minds at once. (Women are apparently better at this than men.)

It will not be an all-consuming wonder, and there are times and places for that. The times when I have felt that kind of wonder, when I’ve sobbed at the beauty of just the sky above me, have been times of transition. Change makes the viewer different, makes the skin rawer. The world burned with beauty the first time I had (proper) sex with my partner, following almost two years of uninvited celibacy (and one awkward exchange we’d shared the week before). The world also lit up when I was suffering from losses before leaving California; maybe the world obligingly became beautiful because I needed it to be. They say pain and pleasure make you feel more alive. I think they make you more awake, more present. Whatever, they make you different.

Jill’s animal bliss is a bliss without change. It is a simple bliss; with the speech centers silent there are no complex thoughts, no complex emotions. As Jad and Robert ask, can you think about time if you don’t have a word for it? Can you think about thinking? About language? The sophisticated wonders, of discovery, of falling in love, are absent. I wish it wasn’t so goddamn difficult. Change is never easy, nobody wants it. It’s no shortcut to wonder; this is the long way. And it’s often a crapshoot if you’re going to find wonder via joy or pain (or at all).

But it’s a wonder we can share. So I’d like to keep evolving.

The Indefensible Apathy (I)

I’ve oftentimes heard the argument that someone eats meat because whatever the argument against it, they don’t care. I get this argument a lot because somehow people, once they know I’m a vegan, think that I’m being vegan at them. That my diet is an affront to theirs. That I’m politically vegan.

And I am, I guess, but not more than I’m a pacifist  at them. I tend to use Hope’s stance, “I’m not going to start the debate about meat, but if you start it, I will win it.”

People have used the argument many times in defense of vegetarianism, “if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.” Which is ludicrous; there are people employed in slaughterhouses aren’t there? The places aren’t run by Judas cows. The idea is that the world is populated entirely by bleedings hearts, but most of them don’t know they’re bleeding hearts.

First off, I do not defend vegetarianism. Vegetarianism and veganism are each an inaction; it is a food you choose to not consume. If a chicken would peck on my door and lop its head off, it might be rude of me not to eat it. And it is true that avoiding meat and meat products is a pain in the ass. But I see no sense in having to defend an inaction where there is no real reason to take that action in the first place. I put the onus on the meat eater: an animal is killed so that it may end up on your plate. Defend yourself.

There are a series of arguments here. One is that vegetables are also alive, something has to die unless you photosynthesize, what’s the difference between an animal and a plant? This takes the stance, I assume, of the divine spark that is in all living things, and as an atheist I exempt myself from that. A plant possesses no central nervous system, and if we believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, I can’t find any evidence of consciousness in a brainless form. I see no evidence that they feel pain or fear. I read a book that said they’d found a way to measure the consciousness of plants, and proved that plants feel pain, but it contained no documentation, and when it started namedropping leaders in the Church Of Scientology I stopped reading. Plants are alive by the classification that we call something alive, but I see no argument for sentience.

Someone once argued to me that no one can know anything about the world; everyone’s perspective is different, which means there is no objective reality, which means there is no objective morality, so fuck off with morality completely. We can’t even be sure anything really exists. These conversations usually happen on the beach around a bonfire and involve brandy and/or spliffs. To this I say: then why do anything? If we say the world is possibly an illusion, then there are only two ways to interpret that: assume the world exists as we see it, acknowledging it might not, or assume that it does not exist as we see it. Option One means live the same way we did before. Option Two means curling up in a room and assuming absolutely nothing exists. You don’t get to say the beef patty exists because it makes you happy and choose to assume the suffering that it came from does not.

Some people claim that fish don’t have feelings. Aside from the idiocy there (who the fuck proved that? what did that test look like? who the fuck funded that research?), does the inability to feel pain mean you have no right to life? There are occasionally humans with no pain centers in the brain, who can’t leave a controlled environment because their body won’t feel discomfort in a warmer environment and consequentially won’t sweat. Obviously these humans deserve to live. And accepting the unlikely argument that a fish feels no pain, if you attempt to kill a fish in a way where it is aware its life is threatened, it will rapidly swim away. It can very clearly show a desire to go on living, and exhibit that, if not pain, it can feel fear. Do we only preserve life to avoid pain?

And once my father argued that he knew in his heart that a human has a soul and an animal does not. And as soon as he can give me any substantive way to define what a soul is and who has one, I’ll give credence to the argument.

But all these arguments can be dispelled much more succinctly, because they’re all the same argument. They’re an attempt to poke a hole in the defense of vegetarianism, the same way fundies try to disprove evolution. None of these is an argument in favor of meat consumption. The question goes unanswered: an animal is dying so that you can eat it. Why?

And there is only one answer, which is “I like the taste.” There’s no longer any reasonable argument for the health value of meat. A vegan has a 4% chance of dying of heart disease, while a meat-eater has a 50% chance. There is no vital nutrient gotten from meat that can’t be gotten from a plant, and if gotten from a plant there is less fat, less cholesterol, lower acidity, and so on. “I like the taste” ultimately comes down to a euphemistic way of saying “I do not care about the suffering of animals.” This is the only real argument in defense of eating animals. An animal dies unnecessarily for a human’s pleasure in eating it because the human does not care about the animal’s suffering.

If a murderer says on the stand that they killed 15 people because they simply felt no empathy for those people, we still send them to jail. This is not K-Pax (“every living thing in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong”). If we felt we could trust everyone’s heart to be their guide, we wouldn’t write laws.

Now: I’m making an argument against meat-consumption, but that’s only because it’s most often on my mind. But my real stance is this: morality cannot be a question of emotions. We can’t say that something is ethical because it “feels” right or unethical because it “feels” wrong. The fact that I’ve never met anyone in Iran and therefore feel no empathy for Iranians does not justify bombing Iran. I may spend days or weeks or months not giving a shit about animals, but I won’t eat meat at those times, because emotions aside I can’t defend it.

I am saying that apathy is never a defense. I am saying this: we must always and at all times be rational beings, and base our code of ethics on that. That’s why every homophobe in the world should support gay marriage, because the marriage ban is indefensible by any rational argument. And it sure as hell is why we should stop fucking bombing people, please and thank you.

Vampires & Transformation (H)

Halloween night. Her face and hands are grayed with make-up and we’ve been talking much of the evening. I tell her I like her necklace, and she takes it off, puts it around my neck, a gift. And then, hours later, I’m curled up in a chair, trying to stay awake, half-listening to the conversation in the room, and I am surprised to hear her say, “Some people are just fucking vampires. I let my friends know that, you know, when I’m with them, I’m with them, but if I’m not there, not to count on anything. But people just want things from you like vampires.”

In my mind, the rememberance of it is closely followed by the rebuttal of the Sufi saying: “Do not become bitter because you are not equal to the magnitude of suffering with which you have been entrusted…” I find my mind throwing this saying at me again and again when my own stinginess and irritation arise; a call to remember that the source of tension is not so much in the person asking for something, but my lack of inclination or capacity to give.

When someone asks us for something or reveals a wound, they are offering us their vulnerability, giving us a gift of trust and giving us a chance to be worthy of it. The other’s implied belief in our goodness gives us more confidence in our goodness, or opens up for us the possibility of our goodness, and those things can bridge the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Sharon Salzberg writes about “reteaching a thing its loveliness”. When people come to us with their wounds or a request for compassion, the interaction can serve as mirror where we can see our stinginess or aversion, or where we can act with generosity and see our own loveliness.

In “The Power and Meaning of Love,” Thomas Merton touches on the power of love to transform the one giving it (who perhaps learns that he is, indeed, capable of kindness ) as well as the one receiving it (who perhaps learns that he is not undeserving of love or unlovable):

“One of the themes that has constantly recurred throughout this article is that corrupt forms of love wait for the neighbor to ‘become a worthy object of love’ before actually loving him… Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbor worthy if anything can.”

Jean Vanier, too, touches on the idea that when we give someone an opportunity to act with greater love, or at least less harm, instead of assuming the worst, there is the potential for transformation:

“I have, on the other hand, some experience of nonviolence as a means of easing violence in people… If attention is paid in a positive way and welcoming way, responding to violence not with violence but with gentleness and understanding, then violence very often disappears… I am not saying that a man intent on killing will always cave in before nonviolence. There are so many different kinds of people with different forms of violence in them. All I know is that if a violent person is treated like a human being rather than a wild animal, there is a chance he will respond like a human being.”

As Bonhoeffer says:

“There is no way to peace along the way to safety. Peace is the great adventure.”

Nonzero (H)

From Norm Fischer:

“…Starting from Greek philosophy, there is a distinction between happiness and the good. Happiness is seen as less important than doing what is good or right. Happiness is self centered and goodness is connected to truth, to God, and so on. These things are usually in conflict, so we sacrifice our happiness to do the right or good thing. Again, this distinction is unknown in Buddhism. There is no distinction between the good and happiness. In fact, the only way to be happy is to be in tune with the good. For example, if you are having pleasure at the expense of another individual, this is not really happiness. What makes you happy is to be loving and giving towards others, and being attuned to others. Your interests cannot be teased apart from the interests of others. We come to see this through our practice. The basis of all this is awareness, of being sensitively present with your own experience…”

Jack puts it in Christian terms:

 ”…All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.”

More concisely:

“Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.” – Elbert Hubbard

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad.” – Abe Lincoln

intro: Jean Vanier (H)

In Jean Vanier’s interview with Krista Tippett for Speaking of Faith, they speak about this passage from the New Testament gospel of John, chapter 21:14-18 (New Revised Standard Version):

This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs. ” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep. ” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”

Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

Mr. Vanier: Yes, I come back to the reality of pleasure and to the reality of what is my deepest desire and what is your deepest desire. And what — and somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship. Some of them had been in a psychiatric hospital. Others — all of them had lived pain and the pain of rejection. One of the words of Jesus to the, to Peter —and you find this at the end of the gospel of Saint John — “Do you love me?”

Ms. Tippett: “Do you love me?”

Mr. Vanier: So, thus, the cry of God saying, “Do you love me?” and the cry of people who have been wounded, put aside, who have lost trust in themselves, they’ve been considered as mad and all the rest. And their cry is, “Do you love me?” And it’s these two cries that come together.

Ms. Tippett: Not just in the context of disabilities, you know, you’ve posed this question, you know, the whole — you’ve said the whole question is, how do we stand before pain?

Mr. Vanier: Yeah.

Ms. Tippett: All kinds of pain and weakness are difficult for us as human beings. Why is that so excruciating? Why do we such a bad job with it?

Mr. Vanier: I think there are so many elements. First of all, we don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness? There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group — the white group — can despise another group, which is the black group? And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something, which is quite, what I find extremely beautiful and strong, is that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. So that, then we go down, what is it that is despicable in ourselves? And there are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don’t want to look at, but which are part of our natures, that we are mortal.

I’d have read Jesus’s cry perhaps as a challenge, or a call for loyalty–Are you capable of loving me when I am in pain, can you do it? Do you love me still, even now? Or perhaps it was a call to remember that love is about action, not merely sentiment. Jean Vanier reads it as a sincere request for love or reassurance of love, as a sign that even God (at least, when he is embodied as a human) needs to receive love.

Depravity (I)

In our puritanical America (and we were colonized by puritans, after all), we seem to be afraid that everything is a gateway to sin. Graphed on a chart, this thinking would probably increase as religious fervor increases, but it seems to be a pretty prevalent mechanism in the US. Overall, our attitudes about sex are much more ascetic than, say, France’s, our attitudes about drugs more prohibitive than The Netherlands (obviously). Our age of consent laws and our legal drinking ages are higher than most of Europe. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, and I don’t know if what I’m going to talk about is a reason or just a symptom, but Americans, I think, fear depravity.

We seem to think much of the world is sinful, or if we don’t buy the notion of sin, at least unethical or dangerous or just overly-complicated. It’s not a matter of qualitative difference sometimes: monogamy is simpler than polyamory, abstinence is simpler than promiscuity, asceticism is simpler than finding a dealer and getting high. But not even just simpler; safer.

But safe from what?

I remember from my D.A.R.E. training in elementary school this notion that smoking pot for the first time is the gateway to becoming a heroin addict (and I think my parents figured swearing of any kind would turn me into a Tarantino movie). Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; certainly many heroin users started with marijuana, so is it not safer to just avoid the whole thing? This is the thinking they teach us to keep us clean.

I suppose I can re-quote Martin Amis:

If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer – or an undertaker.

-”A Rough Trade”

I’m behind the idea of harboring a perversity, but I don’t think that’s what’s being taught, or rather, it’s more common to put the cart before the horse. People are more afraid that watching pornography will make you want sex, that taking drugs will make you want drugs, that getting kinky will make you violent, that reading Marx will make you a Communist.

With my recent first forays into kinky behavior, the only thing I’ve come away knowing is that I am not a violent person. There is a thrill I get from the permission to bite, choke, scratch, spank, and paddle a person, and that thrill comes entirely from knowing that I am not aggressive in any other part of my life. From what I know from other kinksters (and it is rather fun now to say “other kinksters” instead of just “kinksters”), kink can be very psychological, with all kinds of darkness and degradation, fear and intimidation. It can be a place where very real and possibly dangerous desires get exposed. But for a person who is dark and possibly violent, the darkness always preceeds the sex and exists beyond it. Kink will not make you violent.

And I think it holds: drugs will not make you want drugs; gagging someone and stringing them upside-down is not going to get you into bondage (odds are: you’re already into it). When it comes to harboring perversity, I come down on the side of nature over nurture. It’s true that exploring a wide variety of experiences might increase your tolerance for many things: you may smoke socially because others are, you may be willing to tie up your partner, but doing it is not going to affect your preferences. I know from a long relationship with a mostly asexual partner that all the sex we could have was not going to make her want it more.

The funny thing is this: as our culture espouses this idea that trying it will make you want it, I think we push more people towards real depravity. When someone is told all their lives “smoking weed will make you a pothead,” they feel almost obligated to become a pothead after trying it once. We don’t leave it up to our society to ask “do you want this?” We say only “if you try it, you want it, and are depraved.”

Myself, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t use drugs of any kind, and I completely avoid caffeine. For a long time I lived that way out of judgment of the lifestyle; but at some point I asked myself the question, “do any of these things interest me?” At which point I never bothered with the idea again.

Addendum: The Cupboard Unlocked (H)

From Norm Fisher, after the death of his best friend:

• “The Buddhist teachings on death and dying are very familiar to me… And it’s not that these practices and thoughts were not with me during the days and weeks after Alan’s death. They certainly were with me, and they made my experience of loss much more solid, much more poignant.These teachings, these practices, are not for the purposes of fixing something or explaining something. Or somehow for removing your pain, or armoring you against it. What they do is–hopefully–they clear the ground for  what there is to be felt at the time of a loss.  And they help you feel what I was feeling and what I am still feeling: the extreme strangeness, and sorrow, and joy of our human life.”

And Jack, with his usual style:

“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

The Other Side (H)

So I’ve been thinking lots these last six  months on compassion and other types of love but even if there is resilience in connectedness (one point in favor of compassion), the way I try to open my heart means that sometimes other peoples’ pains feels something like winds storming through it. I think of this excerpt from a poem by Marge Piercy:

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

I always liked this DMB song, for the emphasis on Jesus’ humanity rather than divinity, but even more for the way he expresses love being an anguish, a burden, maybe even a curse: “Father up above, why in all this hatred do you fill me up with love?”

Still, there is a rightness or resonance, and a way of being at ease, that comes with opening the heart.

Soundtrack: Age 8 (H)

I’ve been listening to Les Misérables lately, and part of what I love most about it is Jean Valjean’s transformation. He finally gets out of prison, and steals from a bishop. He’s caught on the run by police, claims that the bishop gave him the things he stole, and the bishop concurs with Valjean’s story:

Constable: You maintain he made a present of this silver.

Bishop: That is right.
But my friend you left so early
Something surely slipped your mind

[The bishop gives Valjean two silver candlesticks]

You forgot I gave these also;
Would you leave the best behind?
So, Messieurs, you may release him
For this man has spoken true.
I commend you for your duty
And God’s blessing go with you.

[The constables leave.]

And remember this, my brother,
See in this some high plan.
You must use this precious silver
To become an honest man.

The bishop’s gesture reaches him:

Valjean: If there’s another way to go
I missed it twenty long years ago
My life was a war that could never be won
They gave me a number and murdered Valjean
When they chained me and left me for dead
Just for stealing a mouthful of bread

Yet why did I allow that man
To touch my soul and teach me love?
He treated me like any other
He gave me his trust
He called me brother
My life he claims for God above
Can such things be?
For I had come to hate the world
This world that always hated me

Take an eye for an eye!
Turn your heart into stone!
This is all I have lived for!
This is all I have known!

One word from him and I’d be back
Beneath the lash, upon the rack
Instead he offers me my freedom
I feel my shame inside me like a knife
He told me that I have a soul,
How does he know?
What spirit comes to move my life?
Is there another way to go?

And Valjean changes his life–becomes benevolent, giving, and (with the exception of taking on a new identity) honest. And I love this part of the story, because it’s about the transformative power of love. It’s about how someone else’s belief in you can actually transform you. You can borrow it, trust in it when you don’t trust yourself, and thus use it to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

And when Javert, prison guard who has chased him all his life, finally catches up to him, and Valjean has the opportunity to kill him, he does not. And Javert can’t take it. It’s too much of a shock to his worldview, brings up too many questions. And there’s something he finds almost insulting about Valjean’s kindness. I think it illustrates well what C. S. Lewis means when he talks about God’s love as an “intolerable compliment“. Maybe that’s hell–having too much pride to be able to accept the mercy and love that we all need.

Javert: Who is this man?
What sort of devil is he
To have me caught in a trap
And choose to let me go free?
It was his hour at last
To put a seal on my fate
Wipe out the past
And wash me clean off the slate!
All it would take
Was a flick of his knife.
Vengeance was his
And he gave me back my life!

Damned if I’ll live in the debt of a thief!
Damned if I’ll yield at the end of the chase.
I am the Law and the Law is not mocked
I’ll spit his pity right back in his face
There is nothing on earth that we share
It is either Valjean or Javert!

How can I now allow this man
To hold dominion over me?
This desperate man whom I have hunted
He gave me my life. He gave me freedom.
I should have perished by his hand
It was his right.
It was my right to die as well
Instead I live… but live in hell.

And my thoughts fly apart
Can this man be believed?
Shall his sins be forgiven?
Shall his crimes be reprieved?

And must I now begin to doubt,
Who never doubted all these years?
My heart is stone and still it trembles
The world I have known is lost in shadow.
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today
This man has killed me even so?

Oh, and it illustrates a claim of Jack’s that I posted as candy the other day:

“Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.”

Candy, from C. S. Lewis (H)

“Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.”

“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ.”

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained”

“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

“Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.”

“There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”

“Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.”

“Many things–such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly–are done worst when we try hardest to do them.”

“Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.”

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.”

“And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.”

“Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”