You haven’t been to the top of the mountain when you’ve seen it by telescope. You can’t even say you know it, really – not essentially. Through a telescope, you can only come to know the top of the mountain objectively. You’ve only seen it from where you stand, whole against the sky. You still have not seen the rest of the world from the top of the mountain, shared the view with the top of the mountain. This seeing is the subjective essence of the mountain top. Seeing with, versus seen against.

Could this give us another way to understand that “he who isn’t with me is against me”?

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A crucial event in my life is still a mystery to me. A strange friend handed me a slip of paper, upon which he’d typed (with a typewriter) a Rilke quote:

A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.

This passage is a diabolical lie, but if I had not read it and believed it I could have never have gotten married. Rilke, despite being an expert on love, knew nothing about love.

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Love is sharing a world, seeing with.

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A note on our contemporary myth, Into the Wild: Christopher McCandless, being an excessively spiritual creature, played out his mind-life in concrete reality and discovered the truth about love. Then he learned another truth: he couldn’t cross back. The parents’ grief over their child’s wintery death in a witnessless hyperborea, with Sean Penn’s addition of the digestion-inhibiting herb…it’s almost plagairism.

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We should cry a tear of gratitude for every sacred drop of mediocrity we’ve been given. We don’t want to be exceptional, we only want to be regarded as such.

Authentic uniqueness is solitary confinement in plain sight.