I’m not depressed, I’m broken-hearted, crushed by disappointment and frustration. A hard life has collapsed me down to a singularity. The truth is not as we’ve been told: Suffering does not enoble, it embitters and destroys. How many saints can there realistically be? All these people killing their children. Serial killers don’t fly here from Mars, we make them somehow. We are capable of creating great evil, perhaps mostly a by-product of the ego’s fear of death, that kills gratitude.

Later: The only way out, to stay sane and with luck rediscover joy, is to sacrifice part of the ego and live in gratitude, with a big grin like this super-old Chinese guy I saw walking through Castro, on a cane and with great effort, but—beaming is the only word, at everybody and everything. We are alive! It made him give off a light. I loved him.

–Edgar Cabot, via Comsat

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