anti_

If reaching out for new happiness is what holds the living onto life and pushes them forward, then perhaps no person has more justification than the cynic. Happiness is the living proof of the rightness of cynicism. The smallest happiness, if only it is uninterrupted, is incomparably more happiness than the greatest which comes only as a moment, a mood, a fantastic interruption between boredom, loss and misfortune. Happiness is born through the capacity for forgetting; For as long as happiness lasts, we can fail to see the past. The cynic longs for that forgetfulness which endures.

The person who cannot settle himself on the crest of a moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a warrior in victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is. Even worse, he will never do anything to make other people happy. Imagine a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see everywhere that which has already been; Forever surrounded by ghosts and sepulchers. Such a person no longer believes in himself or his own being, feels everything converging, flowing into himself, and loses himself in this stream of memory. He will hardly dare to lift his finger for fear of the unknown. Taking comfort in familiarity, no matter how disabling.

Forgetting belongs to all action, just as both light and darkness belong in the life of all things. A person who insists on living in the past is like someone who is forced to abstain from sleep, like the beast that has been condemned to a life of constantly repeated rumination. For this reason, it is desirable to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, it is generally completely impossible to live without forgetting. There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, it is the same with any person.

In order to determine to what degree of remembering and, through that, the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if we are to prevent it from becoming the gravedigger of the present, we must test how great our spirits are. That ability to grow out of oneself, to reshape and incorporate the past with the future, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of ones self. There are people who possess so little of this force that they bleed to death from a single experience, a single pain, even from a single tender injustice, what others might consider only a tiny scratch. On the other hand, there are people whom the wildest and most horrific accidents in life and even actions of their own wickedness injure so little that right in the middle of these experiences, or shortly after, they bring the issue to a reasonable state of well being with a sort of quiet conscience. I hope we can all belong to the latter group.

Thanks for reading. I love you,
David