i don't want to be brash but i feel like this is an important moment in my life...i have so many thoughts going through my head right now...but im just going to let them stir around amongst each other and ferment for a while...they're not going anywhere...
i'll say this: i don't think i have any supernatural powers, but i have always felt different and...oddly important...as though i had a purpose that was greater than comprehension would fully allow...maybe its narcissism...but i dont think it is...ive always felt like a hero...not necessarily triumphant and mostly tragic...and maybe its just the natural human tendency to view one's own life through a narrative lens...but i dont think it is...i feel like i am finally, for the first time ever, accepting the responsibility of being Steven Lazaroff. i have looked at it as my responsibility to help advance our species along the evolutionary continuum..for a few years now. and maybe that's not a revolutionary purpose. perhaps many people contribute to such progress. but im no longer shirking my responsibility. i've always believed in the power of Aristotle's, Gutenberg's, and Einstein's, that is to say, the power of the individual to dramatically advance human thought and cultural evolution, and it is time for my life to reflect this.
i'm not sure which part of me is greater: the hero or the coward? but i actually think that is a false dichotomy. i, or we, rather, can be both...from one moment to the next...oscillating back and forth..into and out of nothingness..into and out of Being...from weak willed to strong willed...we are heroic beings all. we are heroic in the sense that we naturally carry both traits within us, but are locked in perpetual conflict attempting to surmount the coward in dramatic self-overcoming and thus leapfrog past the average, past the fence sitters and into Being, into the God potential within us all. we are human beings and our heroism finds itself in its own struggle to exist past the limitations of mind and body, past our finitude.
"We ought not to follow the proverb writers, and 'think human, since you are human', or 'think mortal, since you are mortal'. Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life that expresses our supreme element; for however much this element may lack in bulk, by much more it surpasses everything in power and value (Aristotle, Ethics, 1177b34-1178a3)."
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i, i, i
- steven
- "Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left myself "without testimony." But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; is it perhaps a mere prejudice that I live? ... I need only to speak with one of the "educated" who come to the Upper Engadine for the summer, and I am convinced that I do not live ... Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom, namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!" - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
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