Self-knowledge

by C. K. Williams

Because he was always the good-hearted one, the ingenuous one, the one who knew no cunning,
who, if "innocent" didn't quite apply, still merited some similar connotation of naïveté, simplicity,
the sense that an essential awareness of the coarseness of other people's motives was lacking
so that he was constantly blundering upon situations in which he would take on good faith
what the other rapaciously, ruthlessly, duplicitously and nearly always
successfully offered as truth. . .
All of that he understood about himself but he was also aware that he
couldn't alter at all
his basic affable faith in the benevolence of everyone's intentions and that because of this the world
would not as in romance annihilate him but would toy unmercifully with him until he was mad.