The first days are the hardest days

Life surely is a strange, strange experience: we are thrown into this wildly unsafe world without any serious bearings. Well, mostly we are, and if not, the serious bearings will turn out to be woundingly misleading and fundamentally unserious. But that is only ever a part of the story - we can find direction and seriousness even in this world, even if only momentarily. The first days are misleading days: we can build even on these foundations, trusting our love, our intelligence, our reason. This will be permanently so for as long as we will remain human. So, there never, logically, can be a totally hopeless understanding of the world that would simultaneously be a realistic understanding.