Thoughts From the Edge of Outside
Friends.– No one has fewer natural friends than the tyrant, who is rivalled in this only by the philosopher — the former to the extent that he has reduced his soul to nothing but vested interests, the latter to the extent that he has expunged his soul of vested interests. The tyrant falls farthest away from the conditions that make true friendship possible; hence it becomes inaccessible to his nature. The philosopher rises to the outermost limits of the ether in which true friendship, the highest of all human relations, remains possible; hence it can only just reach him with the tips of its outstretched fingers.
Noble gratitude.– To hate those who have sought to oppress or attack you is to grant them power over your life. To love them is to disrespect yourself. Rather, it is perhaps best to thank them — for the challenges to your will without which no one grows; for the barriers they forced you to overcome; for the opportunities they provided you to rise above, not only above their opposition but also, and more importantly, above whatever secondary or material interests they thwarted, since no one (beyond yourself) has the power to thwart your soul’s ultimate interests; and for the lessons you had to learn in order to achieve your good in spite of them, or in order to resign yourself to what may never be achieved because of them. Achievement against great obstacles is empowerment; resignation in the face of insurmountable obstacles is purification of the soul.
The practical life trap.— The way immersing oneself in practical life creates stresses, needs, and expectations which can only be alleviated (or so it appears) by greater immersion in practical life itself. In other words, the lure of a dream of mere relative comfort as the answer to practically induced discomforts, and how this relative comfort becomes a psychological rival or obscuring veil for the more spiritual types of discomfort and the higher forms of “comfort” (actually higher forms of discomfort) that answer to them. This practical life trap may alternatively be called the vertigo of practical life, or the allure of the abyss, comparable, and not only in outline, to the alcoholic who reflexively seeks respite from the pain and shame of his self-destructive addiction in the only escape his soul can any longer conceive, namely in ever-greater drunkenness.
What price freedom?— The freedom of being unorthodox, or the unorthodoxy of being free. Living always and inexorably in the wrong time and place — an unsuitable time, an unwelcoming place. In other words, the philosophic life.
