[b]Robert Penn Warren
What you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.[/b]
Not only that, but it isn’t real objectively.
History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Sounds like something an Idealist might believe.
Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.
Or [obviously]: Badness . . . You got to make it out of goodness . . . Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.
I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don’t want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don’t want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren’t sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn’t mean a thing. They all look alike.
So, does this describe the things that you want?
Me?
Or, rather, which one of me?
So there are two you’s, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two you’s or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
I can only hope to meet her in the next world. Or maybe the one after that.
He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.
We can only imagine watching it all unfolding as it really was.