Most everything must be done many times over until its done right. Somebody told me that, possibly when I was very young, I really can't recall. Many times over, yep, a lazy man fears that saying. He wants it done, over with, to hell with whether its done right. The phrase many times over was probably first uttered in a Greek gymnasium, where men in the nude repeated exercises every morning. Labor Omnia Vincit - labour conquers all things, Virgil wrote. The joy of an activity came from repetition, from an artistic dedication towards crafting a better motion or artifice. Repetition was done for the sake of qualitative considerations. But somewhere along the way, probably on an assembly line, the phrase many times over became synonymous with the drudgery of modern life. Somewhere along the line, many times over became a program and lost any attachment to human joy. Many times over became, in the vernacular of the Occidental, a program, dedicated to quantitative considerations such as efficiency and profit. In a very real sense, repetition became a curse upon being appropriated by Taylor. In order to have a basic human existence - living, breathing, eating and etc., one was expected to block off more than half of their day to function as machines, simple and obedient parts of larger mechanisms. "This is my life," my uncle told me after outlining a day of work at the automobile factory; his voice, I remember, was tinged with a sad resignation, as if it could not be otherwise. When people ask me, "why did you study politics?", I recount the story of my uncle. And after I conclude, most nod and say they understood what I meant. I suspect most of them miss the point.
In modern life, the sources of human anxiety can be narrowed down to two things: labour and love. "To love and lost is better to have never loved at all" - the oft quoted line from Shakespeare - is the epigraph for loss in the world. Love is inextricably tied to the death we labour towards.
Heartbreak ceases with death - but so does joy, pleasure, and affection. Here's a platitude for you: love is meaningless absent of heartbreak; as is pleasure without pain; joy without agony, and so on and so forth.
Looking into Elizabeth's vibrant blue eyes, I pieced together our first encounter, on a playground - as I said before, much like the one that night. While playing during recess, she walked up to me, grabbed my hand, kissed me on my cheek, and said, "You're my boyfriend now." Since you, the reader, do not need to envision my decrepit adult self, be assured that I started my life as a beautiful child. It was a combination of complacency, an inexplicable addiction to boredom, and a general nihilism about the world - which evolved during my teenage years - that facilitated a slow stagnation and allowed abnormality to flourish.