Dear friend, let me tell you of the things of which I constantly must remind myself. Of those few good things, cherished by all, and understood by so few; and fewer as the days go on.
I do not mean to tell you of my understanding, I myself am not so clever, or maybe upstanding, as the cleverest and most upstanding folk. I’m fairly simple, and perhaps tedious in my concerns, and pedestrian in my understanding, but to my lips, to my eyes, to my head down drip little glittering drops, hints to the knowledge of better men.
And these ambrosia drops I collect and frantically preserve as best I can, that I may not be cast completely into the dark of odious immorality. Made a savage beast, rather than a man in the movement of a droplet falling between fingers.
I’ll hasten along and tell you plainly of these precious things which, by fortune’s accident, have come to my mind, but I plead you only listen, and you being perhaps better than myself, make some understanding where I can only make desperate words.
Know that ethics are not something done for self-assurance that one is ethical, but rather, that someone else may benefit. That debt is not owed by and to individual men, but is a universal obligation we each share and owe to each other.
That morality is not a series of laws or principles developed in theory, but illusions we must abandon so that we can respect one another.
We must suspend our ethics for one another, morality is a name used in defense of one’s actions, of one’s ideas. If one is honest in regards to what is moral, one will realize humility is at the core. Us pitiable folk, we think we come to know right and wrong, when all that is wrong is righteousness, and all that is right is understanding, and then cherishing, the persons before you.
It is better to be lenient, to be gentle, to be fluid, and unbound, than to be sure, confident, and righteous. It is not our responsibility therefore, to trace and execute the good, but rather, to embody it.
One musn't believe in anything to be ethical, but believe in others.