To what degree does man owe his life to another.  Perhaps, he owes nothing, and yet everything.  Man seeks to find wholeness is another's warmth and soul, yet he must find himself within his own souless stew. It is the torment of man to be able to gaze upon an object of beauty and vibrance without being able to touch it.  One touch could corrode nd destroy the object leaving it in disrepair.  A tangible movmenet toward the statue would leave texture on his fingers and memories of it in his mind.  The more we touch the more we corrode and connect with people and the world.  Is there any escape form the devastation of corrosion to the beauty and objects we adore?  Perhaps it is a common agreement or compromise between man and that which man finds to be worthy of such exploration beyond the visual.  If our eyes were cut outs our hearts would still yearn.  What we see is only the first embrace of enchantment leading to an unattachable love and understanidng of the memory of texture whcih the object has given to man.  To understand with such breath the breathless expression that man not only partakes in but adores is to see life and nature at work.  A tandem of respect and consequences, patience and virtue, will and desire, to gain by losing.  To never have had is the most man can ever hope to have for the absence of such pychological categories inthe mind leaves man in the contentment of ignorance.  That which we never know never knows us.  We can abstain and remain in the contentment of ignorance.  Safety of not knowing becomes our world of knowing only the known to us and ignoring the known to man.  It must be a leap of discontent and will to break out of such security and transcend to a place of utter uncertainty, fear, and yet beauty.  It is here that we find man wrestling with love and hate, frustration and confusion.  It is with empotional effect that we ignore the diffciult in place of seeking the simpleness of life.  Lost in the illusion of happiness we are only suppressing, and slowing, the corrosion we fear consuming us.  Happiness is but a state marked by spontaniety and in excusable actions that lash out against any prevailing law or norm in the name of assuming one's or announcing one's self to bree liberated in happiness as a pure intoxicating form of emotional exctasy.  We fool ourselves by following, not what we believe, but what others have conditioned us to understand as happiness.  I gaze up a statue which I cannot touch.  I see it in its beauty.  I see it from afar and let it be.  I stand apart but close just to see.  The things we love should not be confused with happiness.  Love brings happiness and hate, but happiness is a state all its own.

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University