for those who care nothing for themselves

In essence it should be irrelevant of me to care for those who care nothing for themselves. Lingering in the death they escaped, partially or whole, scrambled and marginalised. I question myself mercilessly; what motivates my attention: being a voyageur like those who love war for it dispels the boring mechanical lives they lived? 

No. 

I think not but am unwilling to live with myself indifferent to anything. I often do not want to be myself. And those who purport to have answers bore me to not merely tears but death. Absent 'Original Sin' and death there would be no need to ask questions about anything.

120819 0337 PTSD is
© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

--Brian Aldiss
(born 18 August 1925)
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

 –Rob Percival, THE TWILIGHT OF CERTAINTY: Raised in darkness, they strive to save the Earth
Parabola, Fall 2012.

The allegory of a cave of shadows, put forward by Plato in Book VII of The Republic, is one of the defining images of the Western philosophic tradition. Plato suggests that we are each the prisoner in the cave, so long as we remain caught up in “the region revealed through sight,” the world of the senses. In order to escape, we must focus our minds on the intellectual and climb up the “steep and rugged ascent” to the mouth of the cave, beyond which is the sun, the rational and transcendent source of all that is real and eternal.

 This allegory lies at the heart of a Western tradition that associates images of light with knowledge and realization, and images of darkness with ignorance and deception. Light clarifies while darkness is ambiguous. Brightness and brilliance connote intelligence, and truth is illumination and enlightenment, while the unknown takes the form of a cloud, is shrouded behind a veil, or is seen dimly, through a glass darkly. The period of intellectual decline that fell across Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire is known as the Dark Ages, while the Age of Light and Reason that began in the sixteenth century saw the flourishing of science and rationality, with its ratios and radii, words which all share the same linguistic root as radiant; an era defined by the intellectual fire of Plato’s sun.