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On Snowflakes
Perhaps weakness isn’t a failing.
Everywhere I look I see sensitivity. I see quivering ripples, trembling blades of grass, and shivering flames. The human soul, too, is an airy, delicate structure. Everything affects it, and it is moved by every breeze. It is lifted to joy or dealt injuries by accidents and chance. There is no tissue more easily scarred than the human heart. Every eye has behind it a vault of pain. To become an adult is to harden into some emotionally disfigured and shelled thing, from wounds largely inflicted upon us as supple youths.
We forget what we once were. It is in fact easier to understand a person completely different than we have ever been than one who is as we were but are no longer. The spirit cares not for detritus; it quickly cleans away all dust and cobwebs. The sweet and sensitive are harmed by a rough world, and as the oyster makes the sand into a pearl, so does the world make a pearl into grating sand. What was once harmed becomes that which harms. One wonders what the human race could be if a single generation could escape from the traumas and heartbreaks that force us to play the part of emotional turtle, hiding everything soft inside and putting forward only a rough shell before the world.
But we are worshippers of strength! We have little patience for softness. Delicateness is always a vice. No matter how…
