SplendorQuest.com

I’m in the midst of writing a book in defense of the human mind. I keep calling it an essay or a treatise, but by now I realize, to my chagrin, that it’s going to turn out to be a book. I’ve known for my whole adult life that I have to write this book, that this is my life’s work, and I realized this morning that it will be my magnum opus — the best work I will ever do.

Here’s a piece of it, just a little bit of show-boating in celebration, in which, among other achievements, I burn Hume’s guillotine to the ground. The SplendorQuest is about self-adoration before anything. This extract is an artifact of my own self-love.

From: Man alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Evil ideas lead to evil ends — ultimately to Squalor — but good ideas lead to Splendor. The problem for the mind — for your mind — is to distinguish the one from the other.

As a matter of ontology, of being, your life is your self — your own iteratively self-abstracted idea of your life — and your self is your life’s highest value. Because we have been indoctrinated to despise and (more…)

My friend Jim Klein fingered this video this morning:

Forget the context. It doesn’t matter. What I want for you to see is that young man’s face just as he finishes playing. This is the face of Splendor. This is egoism in action.

Gavin M. George is a virtuoso pianist in the making, and I don’t want to imply that anything of his is mine, nor mine his. I just want to celebrate his accomplishment. I am in his debt, and I am very grateful to him.

But the delight he himself takes in his playing is the thing that makes us human. No one could give him that soaring feeling, and no one can take it away from him. He shares his gift with us, but the best part of the riches he owns are his and his alone, not to be seized nor even seen by other people.

This is what we are, at our best. This is what you’re aiming for — when you are working at your best.

[I’m pulling this over from BloodhoundBlog from 2007. The back-story is the tragic death of a young father. –GSS]

I make my living as a hard-headed, practical man, but I live in a very abstract world. Because of the Anglin children, I’ve been thinking about the idea of fatherlessness, a topic I’ve written about in the past:

I was doing that fatherstuff, to the extent I understand it, which amounts to teaching boys how to be men, and, in other circumstances, teaching girls how to relate to men. You can’t pick up a magazine without discovering what poor specimens of humanity men are. “Men make lousy women!” a woman’s magazine will reveal. “Husbands are not the best wives!” discloses a journal for married women. “Fathers are inadequate mothers!” a mother’s magazine proclaims. And the rejoinder to all those with a deathgrip on the obvious is: “Well, duh!”

A father is the provider, his most important job. If he neglects it in order to preen as an ersatz mommy, the children suffer. A father is the moral leader, obliged to take it on the chin again and again; that’s how children learn how to take it on the chin. A father is the defender, the (more…)

This is from my book, The Unfallen. Click on the link to download the whole book.

That night when Gwen was undressing, she read the card Winnie had given her. It was an M.I.T. business card with Winnie’s home address and phone number written on the front. On the back were two quotations. Gwen read them over and over again and finally she worked up the nerve to call him.

“Are you busy?”

He smiled and she could feel him smiling through the phone, could hear the skin of his face stretching tight in the way his breathing changed. “It’s ten o’clock at night. I’m usually not busy at this hour.”

“Oh. Well. I’ve seen that office of yours, haven’t I? And I’ve had mail from you later than this.”

“I’m not busy, Gwen.”

“Nor am I, alas. Or perhaps thankfully. And so I thought I’d give you a ring.”

He said nothing for an agonizingly long moment and she thought he might say nothing at all. “…Is that what you thought?”

She blew the smallest puff of air out of her nose and bit her lip at the same time. She assumed he could see her as well as she could see him, see her expressions in the (more…)

Prepending further notice: I have not been back to this project for a few months, and I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. Everyone’s money has been refunded, and I’ll probably do something very different when I get my mind back on this book. –GSS
 

Cathleen had plans to take her mother to a music recital Sunday afternoon, but I had plans of my own for a very-quick quickie. I got my way, because I can make a quickie very quick indeed.

How quick? Thirty seconds, start to finish — and Cathy came twice. Not fast enough for you? The contractions for the second orgasm had started by the seventh second, and we spent the rest of the time kissing and cuddling — and making sure my best-beloved did not trip over into continuous-orgasm mode. That would have been a lot of fun, but she was a girl on the run.

We’ve been surfing a red-pill weekend for coming on two weeks now, and we’ve learned a lot about making immaculate love — as a side-effect of making a lot of immaculate love. The come-hither massage is the cherry on the sundae, but there is a lot we have discovered, in these (more…)

That headline is the shortest possible statement of an ontologically-consonant moral philosophy.

More:

Behave always, constantly, in such a way that you will have earned and deserved your own self-adoration. Act always to complete your self and never to dismantle it, always to burnish it and never to deface it, always to exalt your ego and your body and your mind and your life — never to destroy it.

This again is from The Unfallen. This is the descant to my earlier countermelody, both referring back to Loving Cathleen, below. There is a good deal more in the book on the philosophy of love and its contraries — plus it’s a really sexy story about two people who deserve to have the best of life’s gifts. But these three breathe together, I think, to show what works and what never does.

“You love the wild and the innocent,” she said. “The unfallen — that’s another word you use all the time. Do you know what I love? I love sovereignty. Self-control. Self-responsibility. Self-realization. Self-reproach, even, should reproach ever be necessary. I love Ibsen too, but do you know what is my favorite play? It’s Cyrano. Not for Roxane. Who cares about another dumb blonde with too many boyfriends? No, what I love in that play is Cyrano himself. He says, ‘I stand, not high it may be, but alone’, and it takes my breath away, every time.”

Devin said nothing. He wove his fingers into her hair and combed down slowly, treasuring the silkiness of her tresses.

“Do you understand what you’ve done to me? You told me all about your silence and (more…)