le calvaire

I rather have a heart that breaks.

Out of all the years I have lived, I never heard anything more nonsensical that you don't want to get hurt, or suffering isn't a part of life. If suffering isn't a part of life, then why is there so much of it in history and around the world now? I am not saying that the tragedies of the Soviet Union and the horrors of Auschwitz were justified, but what I want to point across is that suffering is intrinsic. If the Existentialists say that "Life is full of intrinsic suffering" and that "One should bear the burden of being" then I must say, even reluctantly that suffering is natural. What is gained from it? You can harp about all the loss, the pain, the sadness, the darkness. Yes, there is. But no one ever talks about the knowledge gleamed. The experience gained. What happens after.

As an Existentialist who mainly follows Nietzsche, I must say my heart needs to break. It must. If it doesn't, am I any human? Would I not feel? Emotions are not just these chemicals that do these things to me, they are songs. They are stories, of the lives people had lived before looking through the world where our rationality has gotten a hold of itself and made us believe that this world can be "free of suffering" and the utopia of heaven can happen. It can't.

As Dostoevsky once said in his book Notes from the Underground : "It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly, that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself (as though that were so necessary) that men still are men and not piano keys, which even if played by the laws of nature themselves threaten to be controlled so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar."

"He who has a why can bear almost any how." - Friedrich Nietzsche.