Impulses

This came into my head all at once the other night, and its particularly stilted language, which I have left unedited, is a consequence of the fact that I could barely write quickly enough to round out the idea on paper.


The thing that I am finding, and coming to recognize as a comprehensive truth in the way I process the world, is that I have no true comprehension of the idea of "enough". While it is possible to become temporarily sickened of a thing, I do not know satiety in any form, and once my mind has identified a thing as good and has formed a desire for it, it wil not die until something happens to prove the thing not worthy of desiring. So while my mind considers a thing good, it will always crave it, and wish to have it to excess. It seems to be this way for every sort of object or feeling I experience. There are the obvious troubles such as a ceaseless craving for food or liquor- and indeed I am never not hungry or not desirous of drink, in my mind at least, however distended my stomach or throbbing my head. The only time I feel the slightest relief from the anxiety that is bound up in the hunger is when I have far more of a thing than I need. Consuming a pint of ice cream, for example, is not nearly so reassuring as having a freezer full of untouched ice cream. My actual capacity for consumption is fairly small, but it increases in inverse proportion to the availability of what I would consume. So if I try to obtain and consume a little bit of a thing at a time, I will always want more and more of it, and consequently obtain and consume more than if I had an endless quantity readily available to me, and did not have to worry that the next might be the last.
I am always thinking of the time when the things I desire will be ended or exhausted. I am haunted by the idea that at the end of my own life, nothing will have been enough. The eventual loss of those I love is difficult to contemplate for this reason alone- how can my memories of them, when my memory is little better than a broken basket for containing the things I would have it hold, how can they possibly begin to comfort me for the fact that I can have no more? I have had my family for twenty-six years, and if it were ten times that, I do not know if I could love them enough. I see no way of being reconciled to that, and know I have no choice anyway. I cannot live long enough for all the things I want to do, and feel certain of amounting to far less than I have been given, whenever my final accounting comes. Although I do not expect to have to pay for it once I am gone, I am possessed by sadness at the recurring thought that someone else might, or that they might have less repayment than they deserve for their kindness to, or faith in me.