The Horse and The Rider | Matthew Strother

What looks like attainment in Milan—success, conquest, arrival—was experienced as one more letdown. What looks like the good life is experienced as loss of nothing less than one’s self. Just as the prodigal son spends down his inheritance to nothingness, so the wandering, ravenous soul consumes everything and ends up with nothing: no identity, no c

Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palim

This not seeing, not understanding, not perceiving that our internal desires are not concomitant with our external actions; this is the spoor left behind by the animal groom. The presence of this factor in the psyche accounts for why women who say they wish to have a relationship instead do all they can to sabotage a loving one.

And so an essential mystery lies at the very heart of rational life: in all experience there is a movement of the self beyond the self, an ecstasy—a “standing-forth”—of the mind, directed toward an end that resides nowhere within physical nature as a closed system of causes and effects.