To live is to remember. To die is to decay in emotion. We have become lost. We value inconsistent emotion over verifiable shared memory and the result of that dissolution of appropriate duty is the loss of cultural immortality as a cogent people.
Memory is verifiable, static and enduring. History, families and the law are all examples of human-made things that endure beyond the self.
Emotion is fleeting, selfish and temporary. Revenge, love and surrealism are all examples of the danger of emotion in human lives because emotion is never forever and emotion is, by design and intention, unstable and unenduring. When we are controlled by our emotions, we lose perspective, rationality and reason.
We become minions to impulse and the angry cure. We throw ourselves into pits of passion to die flaming, volcanic, deaths.
When we are guided by what has come before us we realize through the muscle of memory that we have never been alone in our struggle to give definition and texture to the darkness.
We understand we do not have to feel something first in order for it to be true. We are able to build upon the ideas of others without having to invent notions of our own that have already been explored and defeated. We choose rigid, rough, facts over soothing and fleeting tendrils of illogical behavior that can never be quantified or pinned down to a truth.
Those who define their lives in emotion mock those who mark time with memory.
Is it possible to reconcile those who live the furious end with those who respect the inevitability of provenance?