The Soul and The City

It is always comforting to remind yourself, as you watch them seeking to tear down your world, that your world, at least as they understand it, is also their world, whatever they may believe. Hence, everything they take from you is a theft from themselves, everything of yours that they destroy is one more thing they can never have, and every sign of life that they seek to extinguish is an attempted suicide. All this in the name of tearing down your world as they understand it — which is nothing but a shadow of your world as it is. They reduce themselves to thieves, deprive the world of goods they themselves desire, and in ultimate effect strive to annihilate themselves, all for the sake of shadows which they do not even know are shadows. Remind them of this, and they will go mad and intensify their efforts in this very same act of self-destruction. Nothing provokes more indignation and envious rage in one who craves control, than the awareness, however vague, that he is and always will be powerless before the unavoidable and irreducible fact of the world as he does not understand it.