killing a cockroach.

why i wish to be hated.

Is the holy something moral? Or is it beyond good or evil?

This is the topic of Rudolf Otto’s second Chapter, Numen and Numinous, in his “Idea of the Holy” (1923).

I am reading the poor man’s version, which has been scanned to bare legibility, copyright free. I lean the computer backwards until the screen glows with an orange tint. Out of the corner of my strained eyes, I spot a cockroach.

It is the first cockroach I’ve seen since coming to Florida. I am living in an RV, on the road, alone.

I am counseled to find a community. However, community is not an geographical externality which imposes itself upon the individual: community is the submission of the individual, bowing down. This I refuse to do. “Finding community” is not a result of stability, stagnation, or statis: it is an inner transformation which I resist.