The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making
Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice.
We know the only fish that goes with the flow is a dead fish.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Nobody wants to be passive; indexing is not passive - much more goes into indexing than watching a stock become the next buggy whip.
Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.
...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.
To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
If you think of people as making decisions actively, every time we think about the cup of coffee, we say, "How much will I enjoy the cup of coffee, what else could I not do in the future because I buy this cup of coffee?
I personally want to "do" death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.
Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.
People will not be bored. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history, etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They was to be amused or benefitted
