A Human Strategy by Matt Berry, aphorism 153
153
The Lost and their Leap Over: A man who faces his condition is not to be admired if he loses the illusion that improves him ... the identity he does not have, yet is chasing. If he should look at his condition and tally up a conclusion, he must not forget the element of delirium — of nurturing a vanity that will leap over his static realism. He can only do this by having at one time capitulated all, and in calmer moments, sought out a final redemption for having capitulated, a distilling of a foul experience into a fine wine that intoxicates him to climb above his condition. The goal ... the height of his identity is not just one element within his conditions; it is that which leaps out of those conditions and re-establishes all in new combinations, allowing him to include and exclude—and where he can do neither, he can usually reorganize their order of appearance, or allot them in new proportions, and so experiment toward a new condition for the higher identity. The goal is what can make him more than animal, more than his condition ... than his present condition. And it leaps out of vanity and intoxication ... a dream state. A rational but static realism, more often than not, is a blunder in proportion to its accuracy. It always believes in geometric equations too simple to survive any awareness of his necessary ignorance of total conditions, and in this fear of uncertainty, strangles in rapid succession each newborn witness with its strict formulae. It renders him less than human to the very degree of his clarity.