dangling dialogue

-- How is your French? he asked
- Pretty good.
-- Read L'Homme Revolte by Camus. It came out last year. You can get it in French.
- We are reading the same books, I said. Then I said, Not everyone who resorts to violence is a fool. Remember the story of Abraham lopping off the heads of the idols.
-- Yes, he said. I can understand violence if a person makes a rational decision that his world is utterly evil and irredeemable and that nothing in it is worth saving.
- Not many people can make a decision like that rationally.
-- They ought to read some good books.
- Marx read a lot of good books.
-- Marx was full of rage. Books don't do much good when you're that full of rage.
- We're all full of rage. That's something I've begun to think about these days. Who isn't full of rage?
-- Yes. But most people manage in one way or another to handle it.
- Why are people so full of rage? How would your friend Freud answer that?
-- With a lecture on sex and repression, and by drawing you a model of the id, ego, and superego.
- Would it help?
-- To some extent. It would begin to teach you how to become aware of yourself. That's what the soul is, I think. Self-awareness.
- The soul.
-- The crust is self-delusion. The soul is self-awareness.
-And if you're rebelling and are full of rage and don't have that self-awareness - what then?

-- You become a Marx..

outside it all, watching

Levi came over and asked me to join him in a dance. I got up and entered a circle of Hasidim with Levi at my side, and danced.

We danced around Danny, who stood clapping his hands and singing, and I looked at Danny and felt a part of myself slide out of the dance and look coldly at what I was doing, and heard it telling me how strange it was to be dancing with Hasidim, whose way of life I disliked, whose ideas were so different from mine, whose presence was destroying my world, I continued dancing, but for the rest of that night that part of me remained outside it all, watching.

-- familiarities on so many different levels. so many.
The most awesome is to slide out of the sliding out, and just be there.

yes.

A father can bring up a child any way he wishes, he said softly. What a price to pay for a soul.

Open quote. Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less that the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignifcant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Do you understand what I am saying? End quote.