When Quasimodo Realized He Was a Hunchback

One of the most heartbreaking scenes in literature comes from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Quasimodo, resigned to his life as an outcast, falls in love with the beautiful Esmeralda. Up until then, he accepted his misfortune: tucked away in the enormous cathedral of Notre Dame, away from the humans that mocked him. Alone, yet provided for by the benevolent Archdeacon, Claude Frollo.

But that all changes when he falls in love. His poignant words, spoken to Esmeralda:

“I never realized my ugliness till now. When I compared myself with you, I pity myself indeed, poor unhappy monster that I am! I must seem to you like some awful beast, eh? You,-you are a sunbeam, a drop of dew, a bird’s song! As for me, I am something frightful, neither man nor beast,- a nondescript object, more hard, shapeless, and more trodden under foot than a pebble!”

Tragic, yet beautiful.

Of all pains on earth…nothing more severe than unrequited love. Nothing more searing than the idea that you’ll be forever alone. That the mountain of affection you possess will go wasted. That you’ll never kiss the lips that tug at your soul.

The scene also exemplifies why Victor Hugo was great – he wrote about the naked truth. He told the pressing story that others were too frightened to tell. Political correctness be damned. Happy endings be damned. Men like Quasimodo exist…and their stories are tragic. Don’t try to gloss over it. Don’t try to put makeup on it – it’s real and it’s heartbreaking.

Not everybody finds love. Some people die alone, unable to share the ocean of affection they have to give. They cry a million tears that nobody hears. It’s called tragedy, and it’s an integral part of the human experience.

 

 

Can You Be Happy When You Know the Worst?

I stumbled upon this line in The Idiot, by Dostoevsky. A masterful book by a literary genius:

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.”

In short, it’s better to be a realist—to know the cold truth. And I agree…it seems like a good idea. Great men are better than fools. The genius is above the idiot. But I believe in something more: a higher plateau.

To be happy when you know the worst…that’s the goal!

Despite everything, your toes are tapping. You’ve read the history of foreign wars, massacres, and mutilations. You’ve seen into the darkness of the human soul. You’ve seen how a fantasy is destroyed by reality. Yet still, your toes are tapping. You skip to and fro like a child.

Strength: The ability to achieve happiness in the middle of carnage. How many people can do it? How many people can achieve it? Your degrees and diplomas won’t matter. Your travel destinations won’t be relevant. Only an ability to skip freely through the world. To lift yourself up like a child. To laugh madly like a loon.

People will think you’re stupid. Don’t you know about suffering? Don’t you know about the endless riots and robberies? Of course you do. But you’ve learned something great. You’ve risen above the carnage.

Your spirit is kindled in the fires of freedom.

Your Mind is a Classroom

Ideas are spoken in the classroom of your mind…and what do they say? When you’re surrounded by excellent men, the ideas are uplifting, challenging, and they lead to personal growth. The ideas are centered on great books and people—the best in what has been thought and said. When you leave the classroom, you feel spiritually refreshed. The world is an open highway, leading to a city of gold.

But not all people are great. Some are clowns: the haters, the purveyors of bitter jealousy. Their goal is to disrupt the class, to incite, and to agitate—they have a misery that must be shared with all. They might be great at something in life—some rote trade, not requiring a spiritual satisfaction. But when it comes to enriching others, they’re incapable of giving back. They don’t make people better. They’re looking for an audience, not a conversation.

You have to limit the membership into the classroom of your mind. People won’t change their way of thinking; so you have to control who enters the classroom. Don’t waste your life with the wrong students in your class—you’ll fritter away the years of your life.

Is this you? If so, when will you change? When will you start putting your foot down?

Happiness is discriminatory. It realizes that humanity is not a brotherhood. It’s a Serengeti of battles, and you have to choose your soldiers carefully. Who will go into battle with you? It should be an individual who is dedicated to personal success, a person that is working to be better.

You’ll never climb the mountain of success if you have to carry other people’s backpacks.

Book Review: Crime and Punishment

I just finished reading this behemoth, the classic by Dostoevsky. It’s the story of a man named Raskolnikov who, in a fit of rage, murders two women. He spends the rest of the novel in tortured contemplation of the act. The mental burden that occurs becomes the punishment for his crime: he’s unable to sleep, he goes crazy, etc. Clearly, Dostoevsky is implying that punishments are not merely physical—they can be psychological as well.

Colleges Are Unable to Provide an Accurate Assessment of the Novel

Much has been written about the book. The halls of academia are filled with essay exams on the story. However, modern colleges are a prison of Cultural Marxism, a gulag of liberal groupthink. We can no longer trust the opinions of the teachers. Some are good, true. But many are the foot soldiers of Max Horkheimer, useful idiots in oppressor/oppressed Weltanschauung.

Remember…college professors are primarily High-T women and Low-T men. They are women who love to administer a dominatrix spanking to their metrosexual lapdogs (aka, husbands), and men who believe that cuckoldry is an act of defiance against the patriarchy. The Liberal Arts, in particular, are nothing more than an attempt to convert the male-female dynamic into an androgynous orgy. These teachers are not interested in analyzing great literature—their goal is to destroy the edifice of America: “The 1950’s hurt muh feelings,” etc.

Given the current state of education, with its growing cuckoldry fetish, a new perspective is needed—so I’ll go first. Here’s my important takeaway on Crime and Punishment…

The  Important Point: Chicks Dig Serial Killers

Raskolnikov has a relationship with a woman named Sonia. Eventually, he confesses the murder to her. Instead of becoming angry, she declares her allegiance to him.

“Then you won’t leave me, Sonia?” he said, looking at her with almost hope.

“No, no, never, nowhere!” cried Sonia. “I will follow you, I will follow you everywhere…I’ll follow you to Siberia!” (p. 608)

Sonia’s response highlights a grim reality—many women love serial killers. Ted Bundy received thousands of love letters a day when he was on death row. While Richard Ramirez sat in a Los Angeles jail cell, women across the country promised their undying love for him. And Charles Manson recently married a woman that is hotter than 90% of my friend’s wives. By contrast, how many love letters does the leader of the debate team get? The head of a physics department? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Very few.

Men accomplish great things for the love of women. So when serial killers receive more affection than the great men of science, then society falls into a degenerate state. And that’s where we are now.

Feminists can never explain why some women love serial killers. To discuss the topic would expose a flaw in the “all women are victims” narrative. By supporting the female fan of a serial killer, the feminist is, indirectly, justifying the actions of the serial killer. So the feminist plea for equality morphs into a tacit, or direct, support for mass murder. The contradiction becomes too much, so the feminist chooses to avoid the subject altogether. They revert to the robotic wage-gap myth, or the “5 out of every 4 women are raped” line.

Conclusion

Crime and Punishment is a must read; and of course, there are many lofty questions in the book: What is the nature of punishment? Is an emotional punishment worse than a physical one? Is murder ok for some men (such as world leaders) but wrong for smaller men? These are all worthy questions, and they have been dealt with ad nauseum in the hallways of academia.

But what’s more interesting in this book is the relationship between Raskolnikov and Sonia. Why does she love him MORE when he confesses to a double murder? Why does his degeneracy turn her on? And, to a larger degree, why do other murderers like Raskolnikov receive so much female adulation?

I can guarantee you one thing – most modern college professors (aka, Cultural Marxist foot soldiers) will not be willing to answer these questions. They are too busy doing that new dance that’s sweeping the hallways of academia – the “socialism shuffle.” It’s a hypnotic, zombie-like movement towards a tenure-track position.

 

Insult of the Week

The following insult comes from Crime and Punishment. Katerina Ivanovna—one of the novel’s main characters—yells the following to her landlady:

“And you too?” she suddenly saw the landlady, “…you trashy Prussian hen’s leg in a crinoline!”

Excellent! That’s how they insult people in the the old country. But I confess that I was confused, so I went to Google for a gander:

Here’s a Prussian hen’s leg:

Picture a woman with legs like this

And here’s a crinoline:

…in a dress like this.

Now I get it.

It’s great to peek into history; we can see a place without political correctness. It’s a world where you can insult somebody, and you won’t get banned from Twitter.