If I Were To Write A Serious Literary Novel About The State Of Modern Society, I'd Probably Call It Something

If I were to write a Serious Literary Novel about the State of Modern Society, I'd probably call it something like The Hollow World. Because lately every time I see lifestyle articles about how to find satisfaction in life, it all seems so hollow.

And I think it comes down to how people approach suffering. So much of lifestyle and mental health advice comes down to how one deals with suffering, and a secular perspective can do little more than tell you to ignore it. Find a hobby that takes your mind off of suffering. Buy something that distracts you from suffering. Enjoy life despite suffering. Avoid suffering at all costs. Ignore suffering and focus on the happy things in life. But that doesn't change the fact that there is suffering--and from a purely secular perspective, it's pointless. So ultimately, life is pointless, because the only thing you're doing with it is using one half of life to try to drown out the other half. Your world is hollow because you've scraped away the unpleasant reality underneath, leaving only a pretty, but empty shell.

Christianity doesn't do that. Christianity tells us to live with suffering. There is a point to it. There is a grander plan that we can't see. Suffering is heroic and can lead to heroic acts. Even failure can be meaningful. We don't need to ignore the suffering--we can embrace it as a reality of life. Sure, we struggle with it. We mourn it. We'd rather not deal with it. But we don't wash it away with platitudes and distractions. We are allowed to have a whole world--pleasant and unpleasant--because we know that even suffering has a purpose.

time smells bad.

I should go to the met gala I have such good taste in clothes and I hate parties I would turn up look fabulous and then escape to the Egyptology section of the museum for the rest of the night

for my play (WIP)

the cyerce elegans sea slug srsly has no business looking this ethereal

“What were astronauts like when they first returned from outer space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: ‘They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t got their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us… a rage at having come back to earth. As if up there they’re not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body. Did you know that for months John [Glenn] and Wally [Schirra] and Scott [Carpenter] went around looking at the sky? You could speak to them and they didn’t answer, you could touch them on the shoulder and they didn’t notice; their only contact with the world was a dazed, absent, happy smile. They smiled at everything and everybody, and they were always tripping over things. They kept tripping over things because they never had their eyes on the ground.’”

— Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (via m-l-rio)