New Life

Again:

We are all frantic, but frantic about different things. We feed off our differences and forget that we’re all in the same mess. We learn to speak so as to affirm our allegiances and our enmities, to prevent any crossing of lines. But in separating ourselves from “them” we corrupt our own ideas. All our truths become half-truths. Their clarity shows their partiality: nothing whole was ever so clear.

 

When we escape from this, we will discover new ways to think and speak and live, but we will be unable to live them alone. We will need others who wish to see and think in the same way—not see and think the same things, but see and think by the same method: free themselves from the same traps.

 

When this happens, when people who wish to forget what they think they know and begin to think and live in earnest find each other and come into community, many old and degraded things will take on new life. Their new life will not be like their old life. We cannot imagine it in advance. It will come upon us in the course of things.