The true to himself jerk

I've come to discover that I don't much like the phrase be true to yourself, or any of its various incantations. I find it ultimately, as I find so much else, conditional. Left unexamined, it begs a lot of questions, the most important of which is, what if you're a jerk?

I mean, if a guy's a jerk and he just stays that way, isn't he being 'true' to 'himself'? Why shouldn't he, if being magnificently whatever he innately is is the standard to live by? He would be being true to himself. But we don't say that. We tell him, don't be such a jerk.

So I'm officially kicking a whole phrase into the pile of meaningless words (if unexamined) such as peace, freedom, education and so forth. I assert that you should not be true to yourself unless and until you have become a better person. That means asking yourself and answering honestly what actions and beliefs will make you positively better. Before you do that, I suggest that you should not be true to yourself. A child will always be a child unless he grows into adulthood. And jerks will stay jerks until they evolve past that.

The Inconsolable Longing

C. S. Lewis speaks of something which, in German, is called Sehnsucht. He translates that as the inconsolable longing. It is a wish, says Wikipdeia, for we know not what. But we know not what, don't we? And it hurts very deeply, doesn't it?

I want what I cannot on this earth have. I want to be free and brave and bold and happy, all the things not really available on this world.

Lewis takes that a step farther. He argues, quite sensibly, I think, that we would not have such a feeling if it were not possible that such a feeling could not somehow, someday, be assuagued. We live and love today, in this world, under these circumstances. Yet we hope there is more. But more than hope; we know it is there.

That is why we so often feel sad. We have that knowledge that things ought to be better. We know that there has to be a somewhere where things are as they should be. We sense it; we feel it; we are, by a very taut cord, attached to it. It is there. It has Being.

And we are detached from it as long as we live on this world. Therein lies the pain, the yearning; the inconsolable longing. We know that it is possible, indeed, we know that it is likely (if we know anything at all) and true. We know that things are not as they should be. We know that someday we will, if we wish it yet only because we need it, and nothing more, be there with it. Things will be as they should be in the end.