It’s plain to me in retrospect, that I was drunk off the abundance of you. The fact that you were the most wonderful person to find me worthy in so long opened my mind to the possibility that I could meet and be loved by women as beautiful and intelligent and kind as you. That, bizarrely, was part of our undoing. In my youthful un-wisdom, knowing you introduced the possibility of finding someone more wonderful, even, than you. Years later I struggled for the words to tell you this - that you were perfectly worthy of my love, that we didn’t end because of your crazy but because of mine. I was young and hungry and stupid and inebriated with the idea that I might have even more of a good thing.
"Sometimes we let things we thought we wanted go by some sort of enlightened choice, other times they’re yanked from our hands - either way it can be kind of a relief."
— Tariq, On This Day In 2009
Words fail at describing the obliterated space of your absence. You were a poet of the highest caliber and a friend to the least of these. Your music has sustained and your wisdom uplifted me. I remember our first introduction, and how I knew immediately that we’d be good friends.
"We dislike education, because it was not presented to us in our youth for what it is. Consider it not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates, but as an ennobling intimacy with great men. Consider it not as the preparation of the individual to “make a living”, but as the development of every potential capacity in him for the comprehension, control and //appreciation// of his world. Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual and makes him human. Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we //become// human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place mankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before."
— Will Durant (via azspot)
