Quotable Saturday -- Between the Grave and a Hard Place
You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Discuss.
Things aren't easy because of where you are, they're easy because of what they are. Death, while I was good, would have been simple. An afterlife of painful regret at the consequences -- the price I'd have paid for that easy solution to my own problem? Even now that the thought of being such a martyr turns my stomach I wouldn't call that easy. Death is no end to pain for the good witch I was. The one who knew she'd face her ancestors in the afterlife.
Good is hard -- I've lived, and seen others live, with the moral compromises, the selflessness, the pain of the losses. But evil isn't a cakewalk either -- I needed evidence of trustworthiness before, and now, in this world of caverns, literal backstabbing, and lies as convincing as truth, I'm starting to crave it like pickles with ice cream. This line we walk, no longer fully one or the other, motivated by self preservation first and foremost -- no part of it is easy, but beginning to believe that he won't stab me to death in my sleep, or worse, throw me to the proverbial lions? That is progress, and some small comfort, in our hard world.
All of the world is hard, child of mine, but you could hardly have two parents who know that better than we do. You are the most difficult thing the world has had made either of us do, after all.
Discuss.
Things aren't easy because of where you are, they're easy because of what they are. Death, while I was good, would have been simple. An afterlife of painful regret at the consequences -- the price I'd have paid for that easy solution to my own problem? Even now that the thought of being such a martyr turns my stomach I wouldn't call that easy. Death is no end to pain for the good witch I was. The one who knew she'd face her ancestors in the afterlife.
Good is hard -- I've lived, and seen others live, with the moral compromises, the selflessness, the pain of the losses. But evil isn't a cakewalk either -- I needed evidence of trustworthiness before, and now, in this world of caverns, literal backstabbing, and lies as convincing as truth, I'm starting to crave it like pickles with ice cream. This line we walk, no longer fully one or the other, motivated by self preservation first and foremost -- no part of it is easy, but beginning to believe that he won't stab me to death in my sleep, or worse, throw me to the proverbial lions? That is progress, and some small comfort, in our hard world.
All of the world is hard, child of mine, but you could hardly have two parents who know that better than we do. You are the most difficult thing the world has had made either of us do, after all.