Sublime

Carl Jung once wrote, “The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.” Eventually the costs become too high. The person at the end of this task realizes that there is a spiritual hunger that’s been unmet, a desire to selflessly serve some cause, to leave some legacy for others.

As noted, the certainty of downfall would disturb a human being, so that although only the briefest of existences had been allotted him, he did not fulfill the possibility he had in fact been granted. “To what purpose?” he would say, or “Why?” he would say, or “What good will it do?” he would say: and then he would not develop the whole of his pote

When you have something to prove, you aren’t free. Even though I didn’t yet know anything about his childhood during our first visit, I could tell that Emma’s father was living in a prison of his own making—he was living within a limited image of who he should be.

in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from obliteration, from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father of himself, the creator and sustainer of his own life.

The rarity and preciousness of human life. The inevitability of death. The awesome and indelible power of our actions. The inescapability of suffering.

So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.”

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices!”