Night Train to Lisbon

                
                
What could, what should be done with all the time that lies ahead of us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?
Is it a wish? Dream-like and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life, and be able to take a completely different direction to the one which has made us who we are?
　
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. We travel to our souls when we go to a place that we have covered a stretch of our life, no matter how brief it may have been.
But by traveling to ourselves, we must confront our own loneliness. And isn't it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness. Isn't that why we renounce all the things we'll regret at the end of our life?
　　
　　
　　
Is it ultimately a question of self-image, the determining idea one has made for oneself of what one has to have accomplished and experienced so that one can approve of the life one has lived?
If the certainty befalls us that it will never be achieved this wholeness, we suddenly don't know how to live the time that can no longer be part of the whole life.
　　
　　
　　
The real director of life is accident, a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm.
　　
　　
　　
The decisive moments of life, when its direction changes forever, are not always marked by loud and shrill dramatics. In truth, the dramatic moments of a life-determining experience are often unbelievable low-key. When it unfolds its revolutionary effect and make sure that life that it revealed in a brand-new light. It does that silently, and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.
　　
　　
　　
I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur against the dirty colors of military uniforms. I love the powerful words of the Bible. I need the force of its poetry. I need it against the decay of language and the dictatorship of worthless slogans.
But there is another world I do not wish to live in. A world in which independent thinking is disparaged, and the finest things we can experience denounced as sin. A world in which our love is demanded by tyrants, oppressors and assassin. And most absurdly, people are exhorted from the pulpit to forgive these creatures and even to love them.
It is for this reason we cannot just put the Bible aside. We have to throw it away completely, for it speaks only of vain holier-than-thou. In his omnipresent, the Lord observes us day and night. He takes note of our acts and thoughts. But what is a man without secrets? Without thoughts and wishes that he, and he alone, knows? Does the Lord our God not consider He's stealing our soul with his unbridled curiosity, a soul that should be immortal?
But who would in all seriousness want to be immortal? How boring to know that what happens today, this month, this year, does not matter?
Nothing would count.
No one here knows what it would be like to live eternally. And it's a blessing we never will. One thing I can assure you, it would be hell, this endless paradise of immortality. It is death and only death, that gives each moment beauty and horror. Only through death is time living thing. Why does the Lord not noticed? Why does He threaten us with a... endlessness that can only be unbearably desolate?
　　
I would not want to live in a world without cathedrals. I need the luster of their windows, their cool stillness, their imperious silence. I need the holiness of words, the grandeur of great poetry. But just as much I need the freedom to rebel against everything that is cruel in this world. For the one is nothing without the other. And no one may force me to choose.
　　
　　
　　
Imagination/Intimacy is our last sanctuary.
　　
　　
　　
In youth, we live as if we were immortal. Knowledge of mortality dances around us like a brittle paper ribbon that barely touches our skin. When in life does that change? When does the ribbon tighten until finally it strangles us?
From @我是大皮哥