self help reading + music

The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man . . . [some think] it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. But a moment’s thought will show that if a disease is beautiful, it is generally someone else’s disease. A blind man may be picturesque; but is requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane. To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain.

from: G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"En El Desierto," Federico Aubele