Certifiable gold!! That's all I can say.
Frederick Douglass below is describing his situation as he gradually was self-educating himself while being a slave... smart and free is one thing; dumb and enslaved another; smart and enslaved, an agony...
(Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass p.20)
The reading of these docoments enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another, even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men.
As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.
In moments of agony, I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.
Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.
I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed.
כי ברב חכמה רב כעס ומוסיף דעת מוסיף מכאוב -קהלת
Download - Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Guttenberg Library
[P.S. I've often considered the thought that the above-mentioned anguish is the same logic behind discouraging unmarried men the study of kabbalistic texts i.e. the strong emphasis and centrality of male-female interaction throughout kabbalistic texts is bound to enlighten the young bachelor towards the path of interrelational perfection but with no means of immediately attaining it... that could be why I relate to this piece so strongly.... my humble thoughts... (ועיין שער הכוונות דרוש פסח יב) ]
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