Aesthetics is the height of morality. If you want to know who a person is ask them what their favorite bits of media are, and you'll get a very good idea of what it is they think moral. And for the most part this is fine. We read things that help us find meaning in a world that can be very difficult to navigate, sticking to them because they help us inform what to find joy, and thus meaning, in. It is pleasurable to rest in our ideas of how the world works.
But pleasure is not enough. We like it, but ultimately pleasure stifles us and helps create addiction. One must challenge oneself with things that are beyond taste. And that's what I think classics are for. Books that are inherently hard to read because they're not out to tell some plot about people going and doing the things, but are intrinsically honest to the point of discomfort. Meeting people will always shatter your expectations of reality. And that's ultimately what a classic is: it's a person, coded into written form. Some of these books get collected up into the canon of humanity that we've put together and get passed down, sometimes to referred to as Great Books.
I don't know if The Solar Cycle will ever be counted amongst that number for the rest of humanity, but it sure has been a classic to me. While it has said a lot of things that I agree with, and while I do find it enjoyable, every last book of the Solar Cycle has pushed me, forced me to re-examine my beliefs, to ask what it really means to be a human being, what being good and evil truly are, and even what the nature of reality is. And, similar to the other classics I've read, I've found that I developed a relationship with the books the way one does with a person. But, unlike most classics, The Solar Cycle has made me uncomfortable because it has told me that what I had already suspected wasn't even the half of it. That, instead of being insane, I was timid.
That's not a word that usually gets thrown at me. And the Solar Cycle throws it at me often. I am timid for seeing what I've seen and not saying it louder. That the paradox that is reality needs to be pushed louder, harder. That to be confounded is the result of true perception. To see even a little bit of the world is to break your mind.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this news. I kinda figured I was in everyone's face as it was, but that's not really what's being asked by the books, now is it? This book doesn't fight or scream or tell people they're wrong. No, the book just presents the paradox. And asks for you to either take it or leave it. And I suck, so very badly, at that.
So much of the world makes very little sense. It's not that the world in abstract doesn't have some sort of sense to it, only that we cannot predict what we're going to run into. It's always a question of what we're going to do with what we understand, and what we'll do when it turns out we were wrong. And we are always, always, always wrong. The world is a far more compassionately ruthless place than could ever imagine. God is kind and cruel in equal measure.
And without embracing that paradox no one will ever be their own, truly paradoxical, selves.
Damn skippy I'm rereading it. I may never find anything like this, ever again.
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