Either/Or

«The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road  – and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright  – and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. (...) Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps life offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strenght to remember, it takes another kind of strenght to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.»

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room