Egyptian Soapbox

Boyfriends and literature: How can you make a life out of those two things?

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering - these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.

“Why” is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.

The alphabet does not go “A B C D What? When? How?” but it does go “V W X Why? Z.”

“Why?” is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you “What’s the time?” or “When was the battle of 1066?” or “How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?” The answers are easy and are, respectively, “Seven-thirty-five in the evening,” “Ten-fifteen in the morning,” and “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

But when you hear the word “Why?” you know you’ve got one of the biggest unaswerables on your hands, such as “Why are we born?” or “Why do we die?” and “Why do we spend so much of the intervening time receiving junk mail?”

Or this one:

“Will you go to bed with me?”

“Why?”

There’s only ever been one good answer to that question “Why?” and perhaps we should have that in the alphabet as well. There’s room for it. “Why?” doesn’t have to be the last word, it isn’t even the last letter. How would it be if the alphabet ended, “V W X Why? Z,” but “V W X Why not?”

Don’t ask stupid questions.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity. disorder and chaos. Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check.. It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, male and female. These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare. Reality, thus defined, is made predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence.

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.