Aphorism 20

Gateway to Paradise – Is not beneficence born from excess? To do good—true good, that is, that good that is felt in the bones and that lulls to sleep amidst long nights—unto others first demands a need not being met on the part of the recipients. That need being met then must come from ones with things to give; was not the Buddha first a prince? Success is then constructed as a prerequisite to goodness and poorness is able to remain both realm of failure and sin. They weather the tides not out of conviction but of alleged inability to find themselves elsewhere.

But is not the missionary good? Apart from the frequent instances of them not being so, are not the depths of this world sought by those lofty victors so as to help, or to be of help? And insofar as hell may be discovered on earth, will not self-proclaimed angels dredge those waters so that the denizens of those deeps may know goodness and a day of pleasure, the kiss of chocolate and touch of antibiotics? These trenches are needed lest the goodly forget their purpose, what they succeed for. And if these trenches enable that goodness, the piety of those angels, is it a surprise that the entrance thus may insist “I too was created by eternal love”? Surely the horrors only amplify the thoughts and prayers that sit opposite—the greater the horror, the greater the thoughts and prayers.

But when peered at not from the top of the mountain, placing these peering eyes atop a throne with the goal of empathy, but rather staring up the mountain from icy Satan’s unyielding grasp, does that goodness reach us? Do the chocolates and antibiotics sprinkled from up on high loosen the chilly fingers from my ribs? Or does this distending stomach spill still betwixt those digits? Not only does that goodness insisted upon not seem convincing, but seems absent. This assertion seems one not of envy from down on low either, though a hatred perhaps does rumble in this swollen gut. It looks not at those atop the mountain whilst relegated to its base in fury for their escalation so much as it looks to the mountain itself—is not this structure a work of fiction? Painted from the words of a poet? Or to interrogate further, from the will of a goodly god, the creator of good (and even a hell, so too created by this love)? It seems that this hell, with its emblazoned insistence, is indeed a sign of an eternal love, only an eternal love for the self. The goodness inflicted by such forages down the mountain, only ever undergone from the higher ground, are a goodness more on the soul of the giver than the body of the taker. One is, after all, a source of beneficence whilst the other a victim to their basest needs. And so this heaven seems an insistence not just of good but of a special goodness, for which there must be a normative badness. The surety of one’s belonging there then must be paired with an equally strong assuredness of the lack of worth on the behalf of those down the mountain. Thus the gates up to this heavenly paradise and its eternal bliss may likewise read “I too was created by eternal hate.”