It is hard to put certain things into words, so please forgive flaws in this rant and general ineffability of the subject matter.
Like someone said, if each individual is actually a universe experiencing its own colorful subjectivity, then I do not have any reason not to appreciate your iridescent surface as I would appreciate my very own. I get pretty easily impressed anyways, especially by something that does not fall into my category. I often have much more love for others than for myself. I however would not deny that there are indeed some shameless moments when I come to silently ask myself whether I should love, or even bother to respect, all spectra of others despite their contents or direction. I am not a saint, obviously.
That I no longer voluntarily respect you may indicate that I no longer care about you. I also confess that it is perhaps my innermost fear.
In Hal Hartley's Trust, a teenage girl says to a young man who asks her to marry him that respect, admiration, and trust equal love. When I first watched that movie, I was eighteen, and I thought that the girl was arranging those three very strong words basically in order of difficulty. Even though my friends tease me now and then for being such a gullible person even at this age in this world full of liars and cheaters, deep down I trust only a handful of people, like we all do. I admire much more people, though, and I can assure you that I do respect most people I know, or at least I try to.
Understanding people is another thing, probably a totally separate thing, which is for me the easiest. How can you not understand someone? I maybe cannot understand someone's stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, jealousy, etc., but understanding the person him/herself is not a huge problem. ... Or I should say that understanding people at the mechanistic level, regardless of their qualitative aspects, is not too difficult.
Back to my point: trusting someone else is not easy, and if it is somehow easy, then there is a higher chance of hurting someone or getting hurt because something that was not trust was blindly mistaken as trust here. I want to assume that it was one of reasons why the title of the movie was Trust, not Admiration, or Respect. The movie was not even entitled Love. Still, that I do not trust you does not make you someone of a lesser value in any way, and vice versa. Same goes for admiration; if I do not admire you, it just means that I have not (yet) found qualities from you which I aspire to adopt, but nothing more than that.
However, if I do not respect you, or if I lose my respect that I previously had for you, or if I realize I need to try extra hard to truly respect you, then I know something is horribly wrong. I can say this because respecting other people's subjectivity is naturally a premise to me, so to say, when interacting with people. Everyone has come a long way and knowing that, I am almost biologically wired to respect you. I cannot belittle your spectrum just because it is different from mine. I may not admire or trust you but still, in most cases, I respect you because I know that your private universe is important to you as much as my private universe is important to me. I know my universe is no more exceptional than yours.
Hence, when I realize my respect for you has somehow diminished, I cannot help but think that something is just not right. It could be me who is full of problems. I may have even failed to understand you in the first place, and I would admit that if it is true. In this case, nonetheless, I do not see such problems in me. I tried, but I guess I cannot.
I am afraid that most of these problems could be derived from you.
I have never trusted you ever, no, and it is very hard for me to say that I have admired you even for a second, but I used to fully respect you. I effortlessly respected your demeanor even though it did not exactly match with what I would admire. I wanted to believe that your subjectivity has its own reasons. I did hope to think highly of your rather whimsical universe. Nevertheless, I not too recently found myself failing at all these, miserably but not surprisingly.
You used to be a much better person than what you have become now.
I can still fake my concern if I want to because, much to my chagrin, I know how to lie by omission like everyone else. I do not see any good reason why I cannot, but equally, I do not see any good reason why I should.
I have been tempted to stop you and ask: what happened to your universe? Really, what happened? Frankly, I would not dare to actually ask you this, but what I know for sure is that this tragic urge is a by-product of my withering hope of regathering my respect for you. So there goes another mundane fiasco, but then again, the fact that we are this much incomplete truly completes us.
Each one of us is a sacred universe, after all.
Maybe I should not have even started to write about this; I am already exhausted from sinning with mere words.
+ 푸른새벽 - 사랑
