The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.
Events
Haiti and the Dominican Republic don’t just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.
The Real is ever-present, like the screen on which the cinematographic pictures move. While the picture appears on it, the screen remains invisible. Stop the picture, and the screen will become clear. All thoughts and events are merely pictures moving on the screen of Pure Consciousness, which alone is real.
One of the most startling events in my life was when my older son was about 16, and he blamed me for all the troubles of the world. So I, I felt like telling him, ‘Oh no, I was just like you when I was your age; I wanted to change the world, too.’
It is madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because by herself she is nothing and is ruled by prudence.
Thomas Paine, so celebrated and so despised as he traveled through the critical events of his time, has long appealed to biographers. Paine was present at the creation both of the United States and of the French Republic. His eloquence, in the pamphlet ‘Common Sense,’ propelled the American colonists toward independence.
For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, ‘Flannery’ will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.
If I haven’t made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.
Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account.
Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn’t everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?