that shack and that mountain
Without covetousness, without deceit, without craving, without detraction, having got rid of passion and folly, being free from desire in all the world, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Having left son and wife, father and mother, wealth and corn and relatives, the different objects of desire, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Wishing for the destruction of desire, being careful, no fool, learned, strenuous, considerate, restrained, energetic, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Like a lion not trembling at noises, like the wind not caught in a net, like the lotus not stained by water, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Hard to get back into the swing of things. Hard to write again. I got all of one paragraph out yesterday.
By age seventeen I had independently determined that desire led to suffering—at that age I was mostly thinking about sexual desire, but all the same. I spent a couple of years in college actively trying to transcend corporeality through eating as little as possible. By the end of college I had revised that viewpoint, but now I'm no longer sure. Back then I was trying to get rid of my body perversely, for the hell of it—now, having discovered a value system that aims in all seriousness for that ideal, I really don't know what to do. What can be renounced. What makes for a tenable life.
I should probably cut down on the first person, anyway.
