Addonizio, "Knowledge"
Even when you know what people are capable of, even when you pride yourself on knowing, on not evading history, or the news, or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent and relevant examples of human cruelty—even now there are times it strikes you anew, as though you’d spend your whole life believing that humanity was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought, like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will, never chanted perversely, almost gleefully, the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes— solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short — even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence, which you had thought no longer existed, did, in fact, exist—that somewhere underneath your cynicism you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now, irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid that there is...