Since I was 13, I’ve had the feeling, one I can’t shake or name, that it is immoral for someone as fortunate as I am to be so frequently unhappy. This feeling is the ghost that animates this blog. I have learned to live with this feeling, its thrashing and reveling, in public and private, its phases of virulence and remission, as a kind of soul-work for my un-religious self.
The religious person, I imagine, has made peace with the morality of his moods in a way that I never have. I could say, defensively, that I don’t choose to feel rotten and resentful, the way people choose to steal cars or cheat on their taxes, so I shouldn’t feel bad about my feelings. But I suspect that my resenting of life, and then my guilty and earnest and futile effort to stop, has warped my choices and actions; that a spiritual exhaustion from all this may have let me steal from and cheat the people I’ve known.
Now I see this person, this person of faith hearing me, responding in two ways. The first is through a television screen, an old bulbous glass one with dust I can see in the afternoon glare, and he says to another character, “One of the people you’ve cheated, [pause], is you.”
I’m sorry to write that, but like most of us, I’ve wasted too much of my life watching television.
The Perseverant 