Status Updates From Asylum

For me, the presence of God is in the very struggle to understand Him, the struggle to come to terms with His existence. I have felt Him most strongly at the moment when I doubted Him most. Doubt is the thing that calls Him to me. It is on the point of untroubled belief that I lose Him.

... how can you have a morally good state founded on injustice?

Still, is it in the nature of love to seek freedom or bondage?

And yet, he had lost his soul.
It wasn't that Henry had led him to the realization. He had not been persuaded. Rather, he heard the words and knew they were true. The minute he heard them, he felt not only the desolation in their meaning but also the exaltation. The words held him like a mirror. They called out for that which he had never been able to accomplish: surrender.

How he had struggled against the very idea of soul, or at least against the idea that lay behind it: God, the great intruder. You could not have one without the other, no soul without God, and he had always felt disdain for the idea of God, for the idea of divine presence, for the idea of a merciful watchman.

It's true the future ripens in the past and the past rots in the future, but how difficult it is, at times, to remember the long parade of the dead, their struggle for every yard of highway, every tree cut, every brick laid.

... democracy is an endless argument about democracy, but it's infinitely preferable to the silence of tyranny.
- ... Democracy is rule by the people, or by the people's chosen representatives. It isn't an argument, it's a form of government. And the problem is our chosen representatives behave one way when they're seeking election and another way once they're elected. Once they're elected they serve power and money.

But why shouldn't prisons be civilized? ... not of a penitentiary but of a place created as art, as an institution that helped strengthen community ... one whose effect was ennobling on a number of levels: aesthetic, social, political, perhaps even religious. A building, that is, to civilize those who passed through it or lived within. A building that would do what great art does: enrich the soul.

... Franklin ... had come to accept that there is no political achievement without self-regard or ruthlessness, or self-regard and ruthlessness or, for that matter, ruthless self-regard.

He was, for instance, devoutly Conservative, liberalism being to him a vile cast of mind. (It had its purpose, of course, what with democracy being, at very least, a two-stroke engine. Still, there was something about the word that suggested a deluge, a deluge of false emotion, hypocritical concern, and endless squirming.)

fascinating.