Lust?

A little unbelievable that it was barely a week since I last wrote something here. Time truly and surely does fly.

Today's Good Friday (or yesterday, if this entry takes longer than an hour to put together). It is the day that we remember our saviour who was crucified in lieu of us for our sins, to make good our relationship with God the Father.

It is also the day that I completed reading The Pearl, a nineteen volume old timey smut extravaganza.

``MT! Why do you admit such things out loud! Aren't you ashamed?''

What's there to be ashamed? There is a difference between reading something versus acting on something---only a fool/immature person cannot examine an opposing viewpoint/different idea regardless of their level of agreement. And I tell you, the thought that reading erotica somehow makes one more susceptible to wanting to fall into the featured debauchery is, in my case at least, largely illusionary.

If anything, I get even more turned off by the whole idea of sexual intercourse than anything else---the acts of lust as depicted in The Pearl are as immoral as one might imagine, and are generally distasteful with twenty-first century moral and ethical understanding.

The smut, it debases all the people involved, both male and female, into mindless sex addicts that are worse than animals. Super-saturating myself with this hunk of smut just enhances my overall understanding of myself that ``lust'' really isn't something that I'm into.

Again, I'm no morally upstanding individual---I too have my sins that I need to repent. But my negative reaction to lust solidifies my realisation that I need to rationalise the act of sexual intercourse to actually have some interest in it; there seems to be something missing in the way my mind is put together with respect to basic human nature.

I mean, I can sort of see how many people can have lustful thoughts ``by instinct'', but for me, I seem to need to actively will myself to do so. Don't know why, and as far as everything is concerned, don't really care since being un-lustful by nature seems to be the kind of trait that society seems to love.

🤷‍♂️

I could have stopped reading The Pearl after the first volume, but truth be told, I'm kind of running low in the number of named items in my read list, and The Pearl contributes a nice 200+ such named items.

I'm just glad that I'm done with the smut. The anonymous writers weren't particularly imaginative fellows, and there was only that many times of seeing the word ``gamahuche'' before it gets exceedingly boring---no wonder Sade wrote what he wrote, though Sade did write his infamous work before 1800s but was only published in the 1900s.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Programmed reading will go back to some non-fiction soon enough---I still have 500+ chapters of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine to go, among other things.

Till the next update.