spectra

When I wrote that joy is the opposite of depression, I wasn't suggesting that we can only ever experience one or the other. I believe in both, and we can, and I do, experience both at the same time. Maybe it's a dialectic. 

Of course, over time, joy kills depression. 

joy and depression

Joy is the opposite of depression. Depression is a pain or sadness that persists unreasonably. Everyone experiences pain or sadness at times but hopefully you feel better after a while as you change and grow. Emotions are cyclical. Sometimes we're happy and feel good and other times it's the opposite, usually because of something that happens either way. But depression is when nothing helps and you're stuck in a hole through everything, good and bad. 

Joy is the opposite of that - a sense of well-being that persists beyond all reason, through good and bad. 

how to make it convincing

The more realistic you want your story to be, the more contrived you have to make it. Verisimilitude, like any other word with so many i's, doesn't occur naturally. 

impossible dream

Jack White wants love to change his friends to enemies and to murder his mother. 

I don't think it works like that. 

good news

In his first letter to the Philippians, Paul talks about how, while some preach Christ out of 'goodwill', there are others who preach Christ 'from envy and rivalry', but he goes on to say that it doesn't bother him because all that matters is that Christ is preached. That shows a very deep and expansive faith - an assurance that, whatever happens, all is well, because what happens doesn't hinge on us but depends on God. 

It brings to mind 2 Corinthians 13:8: 'For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth.' At first that seems wrong. Of course we can do something against the truth. We can lie and people do it all the time. But what this verse is getting at is that, when you lie, you don't change the truth. You can't change the truth. So again, we see this assurance that all is well. 

essential

Generally, I don't like short books, but two that I do like are Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading. 

The Anxiety of Influence is the core of his theory, and then in A Map of Misreading, he begins to apply the theory to reading. 

After those 2 he continues to expand on his theory and his books get longer, and some of them are great, but they aren't essential. You can get a really good grasp of Bloom's theory by reading and rereading those first two. 

ታሪክ

It's almost a lie when I explain what's going on in my mind by referring to what's going on in the real world. But it's not a lie. It's a story - a fiction.