Essays

Some Nibley For Your New Years

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Hagoth

“What are we afraid of? What do men fear most? Believe it or not, it is joy. Against joy, society erects its most massive bulwarks…It is not hell that men fear most, but heaven…Everything in our society conspires to dampen and control joy. Our sordid little pleasures are carefully channeled and commercialized; our pitiful escapes to alcohol and drugs are a plain admission that we will not allow ourselves to have joy in our right senses. Only little children can face up to it. They have no hidden guilt to admonish cautious behavior or make joy appear unseemly…Why do we insist on taking ourselves so seriously? Because we’re scared to death of being found out…

“…to lend dignity and authority to this pretentious fraud, we have invented the solemn business and drudgery of every day life. To avoid answering questions, we pretend to be very busy–my how busy!

“In every conservatory of music, there is the student who practices scales and exercises with dedicated zeal, for 8 or 10 hours a day; or works away for months or years, with terrifying persistence, at a single piece. This is the devoted grind that impresses others with his matchless industry, but don’t be fooled! This drudge is not working at all! He is running away from work. His ferocious application to dull routine is but a dodge to avoid the novel and frightening effort of using his head. And never, never, for all his years of toil, does he become a real musician. (He usually becomes an executive.)

“In the manner of this poor dupe, the whole majestic world goes about its ostentatious enterprises, the important busy work of every day life… Sorrow is a negative thing…to live with it requires only resignation…humanity, in a thousand ways, declares it’s almost unanimous preference for drab and depressing routine.

“If the world is a dark and dreary place, it is because we prefer it that way; for there is nothing in the world that can keep a man from joy if joy is what he wants…It’s altogether too much for us to bear. We must learn by degrees to live with it. It isn’t strange that we are afraid of so strange and overpowering a thing, that we are overawed by the feeling that it is all too good for us; the fact is that it is too good for us! Much too good!…We are not ready yet…we [must] come to support not the burden of great suffering, but the much greater impact of limitless joy…” (“The World and the Prophets,” Complete Works Vol. 3)

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