A bottle is itself such a profound notion that it is easy to see how bottles became home to genies. Before all, the womb was the bottle in which the genie of ourselves was born and from which it was released to the astonishment of the world.
Our characters are the stories of our lives. Only two solvents are of use with the encrustations of our characters. These are love and sorrow. We are tempted to make gods of our impulses because they rule us from within beyond our reach. There is much that is tawdry in our characters. What makes it worse than tawdry is our refusal to admit it, so that we give it license to operate with a free rein beyond our moral vision. Character is all too often nothing more than the intimate fatality of habit. The capacity to discern character, applied both to our own and to others’, opens our hearts to the ubiquity of tragedy, for there are no virtues not founded at least partly in flaws. We are always vain of our judgment of character, because we cherish the mistaken notion that much of our judgment is simply perception, so intimately wedded are we to our own habits of judgment, however flawed they may be. There is no road but our own folly that we can travel to self-knowledge. Some people are made of such complex amalgams of rock and cloud that, at the same time as we find them impenetrable, they envelop us. We reserve our most bitter accusations for those we trust the most. It is hard to describe the secret, voluptuous security of a simple refusal to be pleased. The power to please can often seem the power not only to disrupt but to destroy. When we experience someone as “simple,” this may be an expression of their integration rather than of their limitation. With time...
Though they have no sinews, mighty are our illusions, makers, breakers of worlds We depend on our illusions to tune our hearts. We can see ourselves only through our illusions. Illusion is the tool without which all other tools would be impossible. The most dangerous illusions are the ones that we need the most. Nothing paints a more truthful picture of us than our...
