good pain, bad pain (Part 2)

Safer that way. Rilke notes:

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,

which we are still just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.”

Beauty is infinite, immutable, and unaffected by our ignorance.

We are finite, mutable, and greatly affected by our ignorance.

Avoid beauty; avoid responsibility: the quiet duty to acknowledge the quiet call of reverence. So we shield ourselves. We choose familiarity over awe, distraction over silence, utility over wonder. Beauty upsets the convenient hyperreality of our making. A world where images replace encounters, and desire is stuck in an Ouroboric loop of fading dopamine flashes. We feed on our own reflections, consume what we curate, devour our tails and call it sustenance.

The sublime would undo us, so we conflate envy with worship. The lives of others shimmer just beyond reach, as if proximity to abundance might absolve us of our own dullness.

We seek transcendence through fantasy. Call it holy hunger because not having is suffering enough.

The ache that avoids its own cure.

Proper transcendence asks more of us. It demands that we press beyond comfort, bear the heat of transformation rather than merely dreaming of light.