The fact of appearances can tell many things, sometimes even essential things, but there has always been exceptions because there are many who travel wide and far, and experienced much, who have stories to tell that amaze and mystify, and works that awe.  The tragedy of the exceptional, I discovered in the recent year, is that the excuses lay bare the ugliness of human nature when it is turned to or cloaked in darkness.  The mob mentality was outlined in the tragic novel Lord of the Flies, in which children turned against one another and then towards the apparently weakest, the creative sort, the type who could lead them to freedom.  There was a glee in what the doomed child, if he could perceive it, would have seen as a terrible smog, a smittenness in the other children's own being tempted darkly into the dark methods and ways, the very meanness which in good society we try to avoid.  That glee was not only in committing some deep wrong, but in getting away with any responsibility, getting away with a smirk remark intended to insult and offend, getting away with signaling and setting off chains of events that could only end badly for the one then too gleefully deemed doomed.  Usually there is hardly any glee in apathy and indifference, but even that carries a certain perverted accomplishment of at least having had beat the other in the cruel race that symbolizes harmlessly the cruel world their perception makes.  

Read more »