For Your Discretion: Unsaying the Subject

It gives me hope in the goodness of humanity to know that, unremarked by policymakers or the press or this digital panopticon in which we all voluntarily inform on ourselves, millions of men and women are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, quietly and durably happy.

Every incentive structure leads us to oversample the mode of misery—whether to pity or to rubberneck or to hold forth on the sheer wickedness of the age—and rich in therapeutic mentality we’re primed to look closely for signs of distress behind every pleasant façade. But it is a learned intentionality that could be displaced by a learned ignorance.

Sometimes it really isn’t that deep: contentment is more common and closer to hand for the whole human being than we think. If we fostered discipline in virtue, then even when we are less than content the thought would stir in us a sympathetic joy rather than envy. Why do we esteem the sour or bitter man more honest or astute than the sweet?

There is no shame or callousness in tilting one’s speculum this way, and it can be decoupled from any naïve notion of active willing: surrender to supernal bliss without any conventional disclosure can be our secret contagion, whose vectors of transmission none ever ferret out. If you’re sad reading this, we love you and acknowledge the performative contradiction we’re generating here.

This uncommon regard constitutes a transsubjective liberty of the soul beyond hope and fear—I apologize for hope-saying to rope you in. Really, that which it is to be and to have is not the opposite of anything. It is not a tale I tell but my testimony of the free grace in a disburdened insignificance that is our birthright. One can neither rush towards nor flee this old world’s end, and not just because another awaits—though it does.

What concern of yours is yourself? What, in all truth, is so bad about being no one yet, after your passage into the infinite, more and not less capable? Whatever you do or say, the message telegraphed is the basis of all conscious experience—passed over as nothing by conventional temporal presence no matter how it attempts containment.

Signless and mindless, like a candle that burns brighter every time it is blown out, we discover in the nunc stans that martyrdom cannot be a matter adjudicated by physics or politics. If you can read this, you are already perfected in sacrifice. If you can lay that down, whatever you imagine it is, the all is rest in a movement with neither toil nor spinning.

Flowers are cut and they twine the brow of He round whose throat the worlds hang like pearls, whose voice is the word uttering unsyllabic and of whom alone the angels hymn, “There is nothing it is like to be, to be!”