Preferences

I prefer feeling anxiously alone to feeling safely swaddled within a crowd.

I prefer ideas that leave me uncomfortable in my weakness to ideas that satisfy my weakest inclinations.

I prefer looking at things squarely to rounding off the edges of my vision for the sake of stability.

I prefer the constant hum of disquiet that comes of acknowledging the vast unknown to the reassuring certainty of abiding with the familiar. (That describes my preference in thinking. In material existence, my preference is precisely the opposite, for the same reasons.)

I prefer exploring foreign parts of myself to wandering through mere strange geography. Travel has no interest for me if my soul is not the ultimate destination.

I prefer art that shows me what it means to be human (or divine) to art that merely shows me what it means to be a troubled artist, or that seeks to shock me. I am bored by self-exposed troubled artists and self-impressed shock artists; in both types, I smell the mold of a dark corner mind trying to evade its own dank smallness by reducing to world to itself.

I prefer conversations that are akin to looking for constellations — or, alternately, staring into an abyss — to conversations that assiduously maintain a perfect equidistance between the heavens and the nothingness. The latter deliberately drain language of its essential function, which is to connect souls; they reduce speech to mere sounds to fill the space where thoughts might have been.