Apathy is a creeping cold numbness that wraps around your will.
Apathy is a sickness which causes your spirit to waste away.
Apathy is a crushing silence that roars whenever your heart tries to speak up.
Apathy is a deep grey lens, that saps the color from your desires, your hopes, your dreams.
Apathy steals the meaning from your triumphs, and ridicules your struggles to free yourself from it's shackles, by making your arguments invalidate themeselves.
Apathy is not a foe to be trifled with.


But it is not eternal.

Isn't it strange how words change their meaning over time?

While nowadays, apathy is generally used to describe certain disturbing mental states, the original meaning of the word was the state of the mind free of pathos, or mental anguish. It was a spiritual ideal, a goal to attain.

For example, early Christian mystics (early, i.e., the first three centuries of Christianity, more or less) went to the desert in the hope of developing apathy (apatheia), i.e., complete emancipation, a neutral state of inner peace and detachment, not unlike what Buddhist monks are still practicing today.

Another example is the stoics who also considered apathy an ideal to achieve, even if their ideal was somewhat different from the detachment described above. To the stoics, apathy was the state of pure reason and logic untouched by any emotion. Nowadays we call them Vulcans because calling them apathetic would convey a totally different image.

apathy, erotic: inertia, lack of arousal, and lack of interest in having sexual relations.

Dictionary of Sexology Project: Main Index

The 13th song on the album Lonely House by Grammatrain. Produced by Aaron Sprinkle for Up in the Mix, 1995. Written by Grammatrain.

I guess it's up to me to look like I'm the one who's fine
You can only see the one who's not like your own kind
I'll pretend to be okay and you that I'm not here
After I'm alone allow me to release my tear

Chorus:
I don't care, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care

You are high above and I am much too low for you
We could never be the same I know we know it's true
I guess I'm just not good enough for Christ to shake my hand
I was born below you and I'll try to understand

(repeat chorus/fade)


I listened to this song a lot after the events leading up to my writing of The Man in Hiding.
Why should I care what you think? You broke up with me, mere days after pleading with me not to break your heart!
"I don't care, I don't care."
I tried to drum this into my mind. In some ways, I needed to, because I still cared for her a lot.
"I don't care, I don't care."
You care, I know you do; or maybe that's "did" and "cared". Until you made yourself too busy for the relationship. You set yourself on a pedestal, and condemned me for being 'weird'. You didn't give me a chance to explain or justify my existence any more.
"I don't care, I don't care."
In fact, I still care. Just not as much; this song has affected a change in me, among other influences.
So, who are you, anyways? Do I know anything about you anymore? Should I care?
"I don't care," I don't care.


This writeup is in compliance with new e2 'fair use' policy as of 8/8/03.


For reference sake, I no longer feel this way about this situation of the past. To all who care, know that I do care.

Ap"a*thy (#), n.; pl. Apathies (#). [L. apathia, Gr. ; priv. + , fr. , , to suffer: cf. F. apathie. See Pathos.]

Want of feeling; privation of passion, emotion, or excitement; dispassion; -- applied either to the body or the mind. As applied to the mind, it is a calmness, indolence, or state of indifference, incapable of being ruffled or roused to active interest or exertion by pleasure, pain, or passion.

"The apathy of despair."

Macaulay.

A certain apathy or sluggishness in his nature which led him . . . to leave events to take their own course. Prescott.

According to the Stoics, apathy meant the extinction of the passions by the ascendency of reason. Fleming.

⇒ In the first ages of the church, the Christians adopted the term to express a contempt of earthly concerns.

Syn. -- Insensibility; unfeelingness; indifference; unconcern; stoicism; supineness; sluggishness.

 

© Webster 1913.

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