Is that how an SF's blog would read like? In essence? (Assuming here a lot more run-on sentences like haha omg and then the computer took damn long to boot I almost died waiting so save me already because I have verbal diarrhoea)
And an NF's?
Wilderness. That has been going on so long I'm not sure what to look out for anymore. How would the ending of the status quo look like? I have no grid to imagine it with. It has been almost a comfortable place. That's the problem, isn't it? I'm constantly dealing with almosts- I'm almost okay. I'm almost certain I'm in the right place. I'm almost sure it's coming to an end, and that all of this gray matter has been for some purpose, yet unrevealed.
(Taking a seemingly random, unexplainable leap in thought)
Reading Ayn Rand has jarred something deep within me. It started with an appreciation for her craft. The way she writes is so logical, so precise, and so calculated that reading it feels effortless. The narrator is invisible - but what flows from her pen are sentences that are palpable. It's equal to being inside the protagonist's head and heart; feeling the torment of Francisco's struggle, digging in the pits of Dagny Taggart's emotional strain (that's what love is, the pits.)
Reading Ayn Rand's guide to writing fiction, and appreciating the expert magician's adroit grasp of subject matter. She knows her tools, and she lays them out with such clarity and perception it makes me believe I can do it too. After that, I launched into the heart of Atlas Shrugged- and one particular paragraph caught at my throat.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.
Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
It's like traveling with a kin on a journey, and finding out mid-way that you were heading in different directions all along.What exactly is sin? If a creature with no knowledge of good or evil ate of a fruit - what exactly was 'wrong' about it? How could he know? Was he even capable of reason?
I started asking persons whom I thought had the answers, and one who gave me a specific definition for sin - a lack of trust in God.
Much to say, and too little time - have to continue in another post to give this tangle its due.
