Recollection

I began looking through an intellectual journal I kept circa eight years ago.  It's funny how many things one has moved past, resolved problems; yet in how many other cases one is surprised that such things written there are wiser than one feels at present.  Orson Welles said that he began his theatrical career at the age of 16 in Dublin, almost by accident.  He claimed that he was more famous in Dublin than he ever became subsequently.  "I started at the top, and have been working my way down ever since."  I often feel that way.  In many ways (and I think some of my old friends, who knew me then as well as now, would agree), I had far more wisdom when I was 17 than I do now.  Most days now my mind feels like a labyrinth of mere facts and confusion.  I think I can account for such a digression, however:  back then, I had some small degree of moral courage and asceticism.  I had discipline.  Asceticism and sacrifice are necessary for any kind of coherent psychological and/or spiritual progression.  But alas my recent years, though filled with books and art, have also been filled with rampant self-indulgence, and this has clouded my reason in more ways than I can even be aware of.  I know what I have to do to make amends, but to do that would require my lost moral courage.  This is why surrender to the Creator is the only way out of the labyrinth, for He is outside the maze and within the mind and is hindered by neither.  Only He can see all the angles and all the circuitous routes toward redemption, by any definition, because He alone has no need of redemption and only the strong can help the weak.