suicidal because of that but also unwilling to take care of themselves, you know

because they were so guilty about who they were ... and their mode of being in the world that they just felt that

they weren't worth the damn trouble, you know, and,

well, and they all had their own particular reasons for believing that their own

failures, their own

improper sacrifices, let's say, their own acts of individual malevolence;

but they're summed up in a lovely metaphorical manner, a horrifying metaphorical manner, in those ancient stories and

those stories explain to us, too -

why as well that our consciences

don't sit well with us, and why we always feel that there's something undone that we should be doing in the world

which is a much better pathway to take, by the way, than to

degenerate into nihilism and

catastrophe and so

and that's really cool too - it's like

well, you should treat yourself

like you're someone responsible for helping and the first question is "Well, why don't you?" and the answer is -

well, there's a lot wrong with you

you know and

it's hard

to

exercise

enough

love and

care in a deep and non-naive way to care properly for

something like that

but, you know, you do it for people that you love, despite their inadequacies, and - there is this idea that

there is a spark of divinity within us and it is possible that

the fact that you have that spark of divinity (with you) within you

also means that you have the capability

to withstand

that terrible vulnerability;

that's what I was trying to get at in Chapter 1 - which was to stand up straight with your shoulders back that you could actually

voluntarily accept the onslaught of the tragedy of being and that you can

constrain the proclivity for malevolence that's part of you and that's part of the world, and in that - you can discover your own value,

your own intrinsic value in your own nobility and all of that might be more powerful than the forces of

vulnerability and malevolence themselves

which I also happen to believe and I think that that is in some sense the fundamental hallmark of faith

and so, Chapter 2

and, to some degree, Chapter 3 wishes to surround yourself with people who want the best for you is a

it's an encouragement to

assume, to act out the proposition that even if life is as

difficult as

it seems to be and if you're as vulnerable and

weak in a fundamental sense as you definitely are and

characterized by this terrible propensity for

the

infliction of voluntary suffering on yourself and others and that

destructive tendency that there's still something within you that's so

remarkable and so

aligned with

with

order and being in the proper manner that you can climb above that, let's say like Abel, and that you can make the proper

sacrifices and that you can set yourself right and you can set your family right

and you can set the world right and that the mere possibility

that that might occur, that that might be within the realm of

potential - means that you have a moral obligation to exercise the

responsibility to take care of yourself as if you're something that matters and that if you did that

properly - it might turn out that:

what you did would matter, that it would matter to you, that it would be meaningful in the way that things that matter are

meaningful and that it would matter to everyone around you