The Sad Saga of Adam Everyman: a confession of sorts
As he aged he increasingly came to acknowledge the harm he had caused others, either intentionally or carelessly or unavoidably, and he came to profoundly regret it. He had too often been callous, albeit with a warm and sort of sincere smile, believing that he really sought to govern his life with good intentions, but his failures to do so were legion.
He hated hypocrisy but that was mainly in others, his own example in that regard having been poor, although he tended to gloss over it in his introspections.
He was a social and civic critic, and his related observations and speculations and analyses tended to be highly idealistic, and he was well thought of, except, perhaps, by those towards whom he had behaved inappropriately but, instead of seeking their forgiveness after admitting his faults, he sought forgiveness through penance of sorts, directed towards a divinity in which he did not really believe but which he constantly sought to find and understand.
Faults in others were easy to identify and to criticize but in himself, they had for too long been artfully hidden, especially from himself.
He had once reflected that if good and evil were objective rather than subjective, and that if an afterlife existed where punishments and rewards were bestowed based on merit, the only sure way to attain an adequate state of grace was to both forgive all the wrongs he had suffered and to attain forgiveness for the wrongs he had committed from those he had harmed. Given his inability to do either, his only real hope rested in the unlikely possibility of immortality.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.