George Washington said, “Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”

I read this in one of my many e-mail subscriptions as I was plunging into a Monday with a natural, persistent, heavy despondency from a deep and unknowable source. (It was a despair like the many of the past days, weeks, and months, like the one David Foster Wallace describes: “The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death.”) How many times did I read this quotation, Washington’s, not Wallace’s, early this morning before the sun started to assail our dirty living room window, before I finally understood in my dim-witted fashion that not only am I a failure because of my diseases but I am a moral failure. A fucking moral failure. (Please excuse my language – this is serious.) I tried to reverse the nouns several times, but the conclusion is the same.

I’ve always wanted to be a man of integrity, a man Read the rest of this entry »