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Passion and Thought

What is my passion?  I'm an author, a musician, and a cartoonist.  I greatly enjoy thinking about linguistics and philosophy.  I like analyzing ideas, disassembling them, and trying to find ways in which they might be repurposed.  These are all for me intellectual pursuits and I enjoy them as tasks I can analyze.  I like best the parts I have to think the most about.  But I don't know whether these interests are passions or not.

It seems to me that the word "passion" involves emotional investment and that it implies catharsis.  I don't experience catharsis.  I do the things I like best to do because they are gratifying as cognitive exercises.  Must one's passions be emotionally gratifying?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps a passion is any nonessential thing one voluntarily does repetitively, seeking pleasure of any kind.  That is a generous definition and by it I can say that I have just as many passions as the next person.  I am passionate about analysis of method, about the emotional power of theme, and about predicting expectations of art.  I'm passionate about existentialism.

But I get the idea that passion is an emotional thing.  That others' passions help them deal with or express their feelings.  I am rarely overwhelmed by feeling.  If a passion must be emotional then I don't have any.  I have instead only foci.

It probably isn't necessary to find a strict definition of passion.  There are things that I enjoy doing and it's not important why.  It doesn't matter whether I get emotionally involved in my passions or not, which is all the same, as I don't, with one exception: I can be unusually sentimental about the beauty of human smallness in the universe.  The beauty of the meaninglessness of all this immensity.  Of minds and, beyond them, the realities they struggle to perceive as purposeful.  I am not a man of passion but I am a man of thought, and it's well with me to consider them the same.

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