Save Me, Erasmus!

For six long months now, I’ve been battling bitterness and cynicism. I think I’m slowly losing ground. It’s a battle I cannot afford to lose. I’ve fought this fight before (more than a few times), but it feels different this time. Either I’m weaker, or my demons are getting stronger.

Maybe it’s an age thing. Everything becomes more challenging as you deteriorate. Perhaps there is an upper limit on the number of vows forgotten, promises broken, dreams shattered and love reneged that any one heart can endure. Who can say? How many times can words be traitorous before they lose all meaning? Experience too many disappointments, and bitterness and cynicism can simply overwhelm.

Save me, Erasmus! I need your wisdom more now than ever before. Five and a half centuries ago, you picked up your quill to scratch out your praises to Folly. I know, I know, it was a polemic against the state of human affairs but, nonetheless, your words rang wise and true. You understood the human heart and its utter dependence on folly. You observed:

“Jupiter, not wanting man's life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason - you could reckon the ration as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions.”

I’m not sure about that ratio, but I’ve always believed you were right. You understand the human soul. You even anticipated your critics:

“Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't - it's human.”

I took you at your word when you wrote:

“I think nothing more happy than that generation of men we commonly call fools, idiots, lack-wits, and dolts; splendid titles too, as I conceive them. I’ll tell you a thing, which at first perhaps may seem foolish and absurd, yet nothing more true. And first they are not afraid of death—no small evil, by Jupiter! They are not tormented with the conscience of evil acts, not terrified with the fables of ghosts, nor frightened with spirits and goblins. They are not distracted with the fear of evils to come nor the hopes of future good. In short, they are not disturbed with those thousand of cares to which this life is subject. They are neither modest, nor fearful, nor ambitious, nor envious. Add to this that they are not only merry, play, sing, and laugh themselves, but make mirth wherever they come, a special privilege it seems the gods have given them.”

I was just a young man when you first inspired me, Erasmus, when you pointed out that:

“The pleasures which we most rarely experience give us the greatest delight. Few there are that rightly understand of what great advantage it is to blush at nothing and attempt everything.”

“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”

Erasmus, my friend, come sit with me. Help me be a fool again. Who, but a fool, could believe in words of love when they have been proven false time and time again? It takes a fool to give all…sacrifice all…for another. It takes a fool to simply hope and trust. But…it is only the fool who will experience true love. Oh, Erasmus! Help me be brave enough to be a fool again!

* * *

(Ironic, isn’t it, that someone who has lost all faith in words would spend so much time searching for them?)