Letter #133: Know Thyself

The heart hungers for the dark.

Pops,

Well, you’ve got a habit of rubbing your nose in scenes of gore and demonic filth, I’ve got a habit of compulsively checking Twitter on my phone. So we’re even. 

I’m not even joking. It astonishes and confounds me that I, who from my youth have loved nothing more than learning, can hold in my hand a portal to all knowledge and use it to dunk my head in a torrent of fear and loathing. I know they design these things to exaggerate our spiritual deformities, but that only goes to show the deformities were there to begin with. Twitter just throws them into relief. The fault, at last, is not in our machines but in ourselves.

We’re in good company. St. Augustine was famously haunted by a memory from his boyhood, when he stole a heap of pears from a neighbor for no good reason—not out of hunger, not for their sweetness, not even to eat them half the time. He did it simply because it was wrong, “having no motivation for the evil but the evil itself.”

The art of Western autobiography begins with that moment. The oracle at Delphi challenged Socrates: “know thyself.” This, the most profound of Athens’ mysteries, finds its answer in the saddest of Jerusalem’s wisdom: “all have sinned.”

We like to cheapen this insight by acting coy about it, as if we all just had a charmingly devious but ultimately harmless taste for naughty amusements—“ah, the allure of the perverse. I’m being so bad!” 

But that’s just an evasion tactic to distract from the deeper perversity we’re talking about. To avoid facing our real condition, shattering as that would be, we deflect to chuckling over our relatable minor failings and guilty pleasures. And given that most of us live fairly tame lives on the surface, the actual misdeeds in question probably are in fact trivial: doomscrolling, watching horror movies, stealing pears. 

This accounts, too, for a lot of bad preaching on the subject, which gets tripped up in cataloguing particular sins as if they carried the full weight of Sin Itself: you cheated on a math test in sixth grade, and this marks you as depraved from your mother’s womb.

Nobody buys that. But underneath the details is something no one needs to buy or sell, because we all suspect it if we’re really honest. It’s the ugliness not of what we do but of what we want, like you said at the end of your last letter: “we yearn for God, but it’s death we desire.” 

And paradoxically I think that when you start to see this—I mean really see it, and grasp the awful nettle of the thing—then your salvation is close at hand. To know yourself is to know the natural twitch of your heart, its grinding hunger for the dark. And against that backdrop, I find, you can start to recognize all your better moments for what they are—the awakening of something else in you, and the stirring life of a new man.

Love,
Spencer