InsaneJournal

From "The Ten Thousand" by Michael Curtis Ford.

The agony of hatred, the ecstasy of love. Trite notions, easily separable into their distinct, almost opposite compound parts, sung of by poets and wept at by lovers from time immemorial and undoubtedly for a hundred generations to come. The ecstasy of hatred, the agony of love. A no-less-common state of affairs, though comprehend by fewer numbers, perhaps only the Clearchuses among us: the impetus behind the movers of the world, the creators of killers and bestirrers of humanity. Again, they are sentiments easily divided into their identifiable and perfectly contrasting elements, like gold so assayed by fired as to congeal into pure, glistening droplets, distinguishing itself from the surrounding slag.

Pain, denial, triumph, tears, passion, revenge, betrayal, rapture. To which condition do we ascribe their emotions and motivations, to hatred, or to love? The admixture becomes more dense, more difficult to define, and the two seem to meld seamlessly into each other. Although the two perfect, unalloyed extremes may be easily distinguished, and unskilled poets and petty philosophers will make much of their superficial ability to do so, the twilight region between the two, that murky area that incorporates irreducible elements of both, or perhaps of the third component newly created by the commingling of the others, is much less easily described. Are war and hatred always evil, and love always sublime? There are good men who could, if they wished, live in peace but who choose instead to fight; who could derive joy from lavishing riches on their beloved, but instead spend their wealth on warfare, toiling under the command of Ares rather than of Aphrodite, and even putting the former in service of the latter.

Such is the complexity of humanity, which at times confound even the gods, and ultimately prevents them from being mere celestial puppeteers, from representing the earth as a malleable stage set. The world, in which men live and act, although not totally inexplicable, is not completely rational either. Reason and folly, the foreseen and the unexpected, madness and calm exist side by side, not only between two individuals but within the same person as well, all to different degrees. The contradictions of life, the simultaneous sorrow and relief at parting, the destruction inherent in the creation itself, all these befuddle the mind, as well as illumine it. In my memoir thus far I have written of war and love as two separate entities, unrelated to each other, perhaps even in direct defiance of each other, one the sickness and the other the cure, each pushing and struggling like wrestlers for whom the dusty ring holds room for only one champion, It is time to move beyond such shallow poesy, for this is not life, nor is it my story.