When we are subjected to misery, we object.

When we subject others to misery, we become objectionable.

When we subject ourselves to misery, we become objectionable to ourselves.

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When our own subjectivity subjects us to misery, we objectify our subjectivity, and try to rise above that misery. We take ourselves as personae, and become spectators. In this way, we create distance from what is painful.

A self-afflicted I prefers to be a me — forgets itself as a me.

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If the skin of your own subjectivity is thin and you involuntarily sympathize with others — which is not an act of imagination, but a direct transmission of subjective experience — you might find objectivity helpful. To distance from the other is to distance from oneself. This is the time to call on Apollo.

Objectivity creates barriers between your self and yourself and other selves. The blessing of Apollo is distance and skin.

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A comedy is a tragedy turned inside-out.

Tragedy immerses us in its situation. We are situated inside — in the middle of it with the protagonist. We are subjected to his horror, to the very end.

With comedy, we situate ourselves outside, where we can forget ourselves laughing at those who can’t.

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“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.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

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“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.'” — Nietzsche

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“It takes a big man to cry; and it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man” — Jack Handey