shadows

I would like to begin today by juxtaposing two quotes:

"And so, gentlemen, you'll have lived your whole lives in great fear, and afterward they'll tell you: 'It wasn't a wolf, but just its shadow.'"
- Madmoiselle de La Mole, Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir

"If you see a shadow, something's there."
- The Arcade Fire

It's a bit of a no-brainer, that if you see a shadow, something's there. So yes, one has every right to be afraid of a shadow, if that shadow is the shape of something dangerous or threatening. If you see a wolf's shadow, then there's a wolf there. Unless, of course, there is just a wooden cut-out of a wolf, in which case the shadow wouldn't move for hours at a time, and that would be fairly obvious.

I'm not really certain why it occurred to me to use these two quotes as writing material, but for some reason they tickled my fancy. Maybe I just have a fixation with the whole light-darkness motif. Anyhow, we can learn a lot from shadows. Because they move and change, and give us a kind of litmus test for truth. You're probably thinking, What? It's true though. Shadows and emanations give us a conditionality.

The criteria for the truthfulness of a thing is constantly shifting and fluxing, just like shadows. As we live on, any true thing must remain true in all of the shifting, dancing shadows that pass over it. Not to get heavy here, but this is a quote made by Irving Greenberg after the Holocaust:
“No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.”

This is pretty heavy. But any statement or axiom or what-have-you must be as true in the shadow of a tombstone as it is in the shade of a tree. It has to be as true in the hovel as it is in a mansion. It has to be as true out of the mouth of a liar as it is from the very lips of Jesus Christ. It has to be as true in hell as it is in heaven.

It would be nice to believe that everything we believe and feel strongly is true. But it is for the good of everyone that we temper our claims and statements with the events and shadows of history and plain practicality.
Be credible people, that's all I'm saying here.

So as not to leave you with a somber fermata, another edition of things that do and do not rule:
Someone that rules: Will Campbell (if you don't who he is, look him up)
Someone who does not rule: Orson Scott Card (that guy sucks)

Salud,
Alexander de Nordville