A profound thought for the day.

I've been thinking a lot about Paradise lately. Because I spend much of my life there. Yes, my little Paradise. Seems to me one can easily find one's way to Paradise by falling in love. I mean real love. Not fake and pretend and going-through-the-motions stuff. I know Paradise exists. Beyond a doubt. It's a huge garden. Perhaps the original Garden of Eden. Seems to me that god never banished us from Eden. We were given return tickets. To visit. Temporarily. And momentarily. If not forever. As a reminder of the power of love. Anyway, I'm sure everybody has a concept of Paradise. And I just read a profound one. In a book. A novel. Titled 'Love & Garbage.' By the Czech writer Ivan Klima. Here it is:

'We have been expelled from paradise, but paradise was not destroyed, Kafka wrote. And he added: In a sense, the expulsion from paradise was a blessing, because if we hadn't been driven out paradise itself would have had to be destroyed.
'The vision of paradise persists within us, and with it also the vision of togetherness. For in paradise there is no such thing as isolation, man lives there in the company of angels and in the proximity of God. In paradise we shall be ranged in a higher and eternal order, which eludes us on earth, where we are cast, where we are outcast.
'We long for paradise and we long to escape from loneliness.
'We attempt to do so by seeking a great love, or else we blunder from one person to another in the hope that someone will at last take notice of us, will long to meet us or at least to talk to us. Some write poetry for this reason, or go on protest marches, cheer some figure, make friends with the heroes of television serials, believe in gods or in revolutionary comradeship, turn into informers to ensure they are sympathetically received at least at some police department, or they strangle someone. Even murder is an encounter between one man and another.
'Out of his isolation man can be liberated not only by love but also by hate. Hate is mistakenly regarded as the opposite of love, whereas in reality it stands alongside love and the opposite of both of them is loneliness. We often believe that we are tied to someone by love, and meanwhile we're only tied to them by hate, which we prefer to loneliness.
'Hate will remain with us so long as we do not accept that loneliness is our only possible, or indeed necessary, fate.'

Now, if that's not a profound thought for the day, you must tell me what is. --Jim Broede