Letter 1

15 Nov 24. Cuenca

Dear Thomas,

I've been looking at my life from the outside. This is possible due to an unplanned for disassociation combined with a lifetime of philosophical discipline and seeing things through a historical and rationalistic lens.

Seeing clearly has always been important to me. I'm not sure why – most people go through their entire lives without seeing anything with what could be called “clarity.” I was not so naive as to think that such a perspective could be without risk – I've read a lot, from Plato to Ligotti, from Heraclitus to K-Punk, and I know the hazards of inquiry, but somehow, I was possessed of the hubris to think that more light was always a good thing.

Consider what it would have been to be Prometheus, with a variation: You do your best to bring fire to humanity, expecting nothing in return, and end up chained to a rock with the vulture gnawing on your liver every day. Then you look out to see that humanity really didn't have much use for fire. They didn't build anything, or even warm themselves, they just kept squatting in their damp, dark caves. Complaining about the dark and the damp, but unwilling to do the work of building a fire.

As you watched the last sparks of your gift sputter and die, you wonder whether it was worth getting your liver torn out every day. You even begin to doubt the value of your gift, since nothing changed, and you are chained to a rock.

And they don't know your name.

Keats thought his epitaph would be, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” He was wrong. He wrote poetry that long survived him, although there are few that hear him now. Consider:

“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

- “Melancholy,” 1819

I was never beautiful. Not in frame, or face, or thought, or art. But, just as Nietzsche knew what strength is, despite, or perhaps because of his physical weakness, I could look toward Beauty, and know it for what it was.

I don't mean to elevate myself to the significance or grace of a Keats, or a Nietzsche. That would be assuming airs infinitely far above my gifts or accomplishments. But I do know something. I know what humanity is. I can recognize the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. I know the ways of human thriving, even if I haven't the ability to build that path myself.

The easy accusation to level against me, I suppose, is self-pity. In someone like me, self-pity would be a laughable vice. But I do not possess that flaw among my extensive catalog of failings. In order to be self-pitying, one must believe that there is a fundamental injustice in the way one's life played out. I do not believe that I was, or am, significant enough to think that there was some injustice in having been so largely ignored. I knew. I had read, and considered the likely fate of my gifts, and of myself. I am not a martyr. No one would, or should, have ever bothered to martyr me.

I will never commit suicide. It's been done to death.

The consequence is that I age here, silenced by my own hand, waiting, perhaps for decades, for the decline and the end. I picture a stage, actor that I am, alone far upstage, out of the light, taking a last bow in a dark and mostly empty theater. I have given the performance of my life, but it was not enough. There is scattered and desultory applause, sustained barely long enough for a single bow.

And then, looking out, hearing the slight, fragile ovation dying, wanting nothing more than for the lights to go out, and to escape into the wings.

A better artist said, “So it goes.”

So it does.