let it be

David and Duncan ❤️ omg how cute!

★

9/27/2016

I finally get around to going home. The strange thing is I have no idea where home is anymore. They say home is where safety gets to drink tea without worry that fear would bring the coffee. That shit was never strong enough anyway. So you come home a whole year later. You’re not crying anymore. Ok. Well maybe sometimes. I’m not a robot, but if in some magical way I was a robot, I’d be the only robot with a heart. My poor, poor mechanical heart. It’s a good thing I don’t cry as much. I get to spend more time thinking. Some days I still dwell on the past, but mostly I dream about the future. For example: I used to think my bed would still smell like her. The thing is… you slowly start to forget. Faces become blurry. You forget their eye colors. Everything that used to matter it’s likely that it no longer does. You can sleep without fear. You can wake up without needing someone. I think that’s the messed up part. I went from melting your image into my skull to not needing you at all. So you come home one day and look into your restroom mirror– everything is the same except for you.

Misty sunrise on the Cobden road

It is often claimed in this context that people define themselves, which is often perceived as stating that they can wish to be something—anything, a bird, for instance—and then be it. According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that people are  defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (cruel persons). This is as opposed to their genes, or human nature, bearing the blame.

As Sartre writes in his work Existentialism is a Humanism: “… man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.” Of course, the more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since humans can choose to be either cruel or good, they are, in fact, neither of these things essentially.

“The subjective thinker’s form, the form of his communication, is his style. His form must be just as manifold as are the opposites that he holds together. The systematic eins, zwei, drei is an abstract form that also must inevitably run into trouble whenever it is to be applied to the concrete. To the same degree as the subjective thinker is concrete, to the same degree his form must also be concretely dialectical. But just as he himself is not a poet, not an ethicist, not a dialectician, so also his form is none of these directly. His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious. Subordinate character, setting, etc., which belong to the well balanced character of the esthetic production, are in themselves breadth; the subjective thinker has only one setting—existence—and has nothing to do with localities and such things. The setting is not the fairyland of the imagination, where poetry produces consummation, nor is the setting laid in England, and historical accuracy is not a concern. The setting is inwardness in existing as a human being; the concretion is the relation of the existence-categories to one another. Historical accuracy and historical actuality are breadth.”

- Søren Kierkegaard (Concluding Postscript, Hong p. 357–358)