Intermission: The Philosophy of Silus White

In The Name of ScienceIntermission:The Philosophy of Silus White     Thief.     I've been tossing that word around a whole hell of a lot since I sat down and started writing this. I could could spice my writing up a bit and use different words like crook, burglar, criminal, robber, purloiner, moonlighter, klepto, larcener--or any other juicy words that I totally didn't get from a thesaurus--but thief just has this kind of ring to it. All of those other words sounded so... negative; like they belonged to a bad person. I wasn't a bad person. Thief sounds more neutral, being neither too negative or positive. It was not black, it was not white, just grey.     Grey.     Most people, including myself, like to see things in plain black and white. They want to be able to point at anything or anyone in the world and say "That's black!" or "That's white!" "That's evil!" or "That's good!" It would make life so easy and much more bearable if we could label everything as one or the other. Sadly, that's not how the world works, even in Equestria. Everthing to ever exist, my friends, is just a different shade of grey. The good things in your life could be the things that kill you, and the bad things could be the things that save you. It's not some great tragedy about the human (or equine) nature, what it really is is a fact. It's just life.     Life.     I like to think of everything I did with Pi and The Family as one big yin-yang. You know, the old Chinese symbol that looks like a pair of tadpoles swimming around one another in a big 69. You can see how the white part has a little black dot in it and the black has a little white dot in it. The good has a little bad in it, and the bad has a little good in it. It might vary from time too time depending on the circumstances, but all in all, that's life, baby. Funny how something we think is so complicated can be summed up with a symbol that you could make with a stick in the dirt.      Life is grey.      It is grey, it always has been grey, and it will continue on to be grey. We are all a delicate balance of both good and evil at the same time. Nothing can change it, the only thing to do is to accept it and keep on going. If we finnaly learn to live with that, we can move on. If we learn to accept and embrace it, we can do just about anything with our life.      I wish I could have accepted it back then. As I stood in that shitty wooden shack, caught up in the middle of a war between The Family and the rest of Equestria, I had no idea about any of this. I still thought that I would be a bad person just because I broke the law. I still felt that churning in my stomach every time Rarity or diamonds crossed my mind. I would eventually forgive myself for that, but it didn't exactly happen overnight. The world had bigger problems than the theft of a single gem.     I didn't know it at the time, but when I offered Royal Blue and The Family my help, I set the stage for what would become the chaotic adventure that was to be the rest of my life. I know now that I was in over my head, very much so. The responsibilities of Pi's demands and working for the guild would weighed heavily on my metaphorical body, and the strenuous activities and constant dangers of the thief life would weigh even more on my littereal body. But I'm happy to say that I survived it all. Yes siree, hell and high water has come for me before, more than once in fact. And you know what? I kicked its ass, even as it kicked mine. I survived Equestria...     Well, just barely.     Stay tuned for what's to come, folks.