that cesspool, it becomes you, just north of the eyebrows...

My original plan was to come here and let off a little Lyleistic steam in this, my new sauna, but I realized at the last second that I'd rather keep that steam to myself. Keep my antiquated engines chug-chug-chugging along at their level best slash middling to sub-par by modern standards speed. Quite a mouthful there. Or ... eyeful. I suppose. Today I, almost inadvertently, read a book. Re-read really though my memory of it was patchy. It's entitled 'Road of the Patriarch' and it was written by R.A.Salvatore whose name you may or may not recognize as that of fantasy author extraordinaire, writer of many a Forgotten Realms novel and all round cool guy. I liked some of his other books better and I liked this one better than others but one journal entry of a character caught my eye and, in lieu of summoning up some vitriolic observations or psuedo-witty solipsisms of my own, I thought I might share these thoughtful scrawlings instead. Not what one might expect from what are essentially dungeons and dragons novels - where there are evil sorcerers and valiant knights. Just goes to show; book, cover, judge.

Et cetera.

"The point of self-reflection is, foremost, to clarify and to find honesty. Self-reflection is the way to throw self-lies out and face the truth - however painful it might be to admit that you were wrong. We seek consistency in ourselves, and so when we are faced with inconsistency, we struggle to deny. Denial has no place in self-reflection, and so it is incumbent upon a person to admit his or her errors, to embrace them and to move along in a more positive direction.
We can fool ourselves for all sorts of reasons. Mostly for the sake of our ego, of course, but sometimes, I now understand, because we are afraid. For sometimes we are afraid to hope, because hope breeds expectation, and expectation can lead to disappointment." ... "Would my increasing anger have led me down the road he chose, that of passionless killer? It seems a logical thing to me that I might have lost myself in the demands of perfectionism, and would have found refuge in the banality of a live lived without passion. A lack of passion is perhaps a lack of introspection, and it is that very nature of self-evaluation that would have utterly destroyed my soul had I remained in the city of my birth...

Reality is a curious thing. Truth is not as solid and universal as any of us would like it to be; selfishness guides perception, and perception invites justification. The physical image in the mirror, if not pleasing, can be altered by the mere brush of fingers through hair. And so it is true that we can manipulate our own reality. We can persuade, even deceive. We can make others view us in dishonest ways. We can hide selfishness with charity, make a craving for acceptance into magnanimity, and amplify our smile to coerce a hesitant lover. The world is illusion, and often delusion, as victors write the histories and the children who die quietly under the stamp of a triumphant army never really existed. The robber baron becomes philanthropist in the final analysis, by bequeathing only that for which he had no more use. The king who sends young men and women to die becomes beneficent with the kiss of a baby. Every problem becomes a problem of perception to those who understand that reality, in reality, is what you make reality to be.
This is the way of the world - but it is not the only way..." ... "... Theirs is not a manner of masquerading reality to alter perception, but a determination to better reality, to follow a vision, and to trust their course is true, and it therefore follows, that perception of them will be just and kind. For a more difficult alteration than the physical is the image that appears in the glass of introspection, the pureness or rot of the heart and the soul.

For many, sadly, this is not an issue, for the illusion of their lives becomes self-delusion, a masquerade that revels in the applause and sees in a pittance to charity a stain remover for the soul. How many conquerors, I wonder, who crushed out the lives of tens of thousands, could not hear the cries of inflicted despair beyond the applause of those who believed the wars would make the world a better place? How many thieves, I wonder, hear not the laments of victims and willingly blind themselves to the misery wrought of their violation under a blanket of their own suffered injustices? When does theft become entitlement? There are those who cannot see the stains on their souls. Some lack the capacity to look in the glass of introspection, perhaps, and others alter reality without and within.
It is, then, the outward misery of Artemis Entreri that has long offered me hope. He doesn't lack passion; he hides from it. He becomes an instrument, a weapon, because otherwise he must be human. He knows the glass all too well, I see clearly now, and he cannot talk himself around the obvious stain. His justifications for his actions ring hollow - to him most of all. Only there, in that place, is the road to redemption, for any of us. Only in facing honestly that image in the glass can we change the reality of who we are. Only in seeing the scars and the stains and the rot can we begin to heal. I think of Artemis Entreri often because that is my hope for the man. It is a fleeting and distant hope to be sure, and perhaps in the end, it is nothing more than my own selfish need to believe that there is redemption and that there can be change.
For Entreri? If so, then for anyone.
For Lyle?..."



;)