Happiness, pure and simple.

"My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications — for instance, that we are an aggressive species — are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey our deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom."

Everything is serial killers now. They say everyone is naturally fascinated by a man planning and committing one murder after another without the least reason and not even knowing who he kills personally. There was a man up in the city recently who tortured and tormented three tiny little boys and took photographs of them while he tortured them and of their corpses after he killed them. Authorities are talking now about what they ought to do with these photographs. They could make a lot of money from a book of them. He was apprehended by the police as he lured yet another tiny boy to come with him, as in a nightmare. There were men in California and Texas and I believe Chicago who dismembered and buried innumerably. Then of course it goes back in history to Jack the Ripper who killed poor women and was supposed to be a member of the Royal Family of England, and no doubt before his time there were many other serial killers, many of them members of Royal Families or Emperors and Generals who killed thousands and thousands of people. But in wars they kill people more or less simultaneously, not one by one, so that they are mass murderers, not serial killers, but I'm not sure I see the difference, really. Since for the person being murdered it only happens once.

how are we almost halfway through the year

“I so often remain silent. I am like a wolf in his den hiding my grief, it’s hard on people.”

Never read Baldwin before?

My next Black History Month request: