A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the imagines, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charm has begun to leak away from us.

Maine de Biran

 



The Nostalgia of the Infinite - painting by metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico.

Her deep affairs with those long dead; poets and writers whom she knew better than any lover.

I miss Adelaide. She would take the stairs to avoid crowded elevators and buy two ice creams because one flavour wasn't enough. I know she knew how much i loved this of her even if i hadn't told her in years. Every moment i spent with her made me better or worse - but not nothing. She's the laughing wickedness of adolescence - and if what they say is true, that the dead are kept alive by being remembered, she'd be horrified of her immortality in my memories.

It's windy today and I started idly reading Fear & Trembling by Kierkegaard, mainly because it came free at the shop with a couple of its phenomenological counterparts. Philosophy books are expensive, which is unfortunate because the type of people who buy them are mostly poor. So there was wind and rain = windy rain, and i ducked into the bookstore when my coffee rolled away. The wind didn't determine my perusing of epistemological philosophy, though it did lead to the conditions for it. I have no class + it's cold + i'm procrastinating = bad at maths.

Kierkegaard is the omniscient hand who wrote the infamous words (infamous only to those who have heard of it probably); 'if there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?'

He writes of all the big things that no one really cares to think about like Faith and Death and Meaning and Knowledge and Ignorance - 'passion is needed even to make the familiar Socratic distinction between what one does and what one doesn't understand; naturally even more so in making the Socratic movement, that of ignorance. What we lack today is not reflection but passion. For that reason our age is really in a sense too tenacious to die, for dying is one of the most remarkable leaps - as the poet ends thus, 'ein seliger Sprung in die Ewigkeit' (a blessed leap into eternity).' (I don't know if i understood this the way it was meant to be understood ((if anyone had ever really understood)) but i found it interesting somehow anyway)

However Beatrix Potter wrote in The Tale of Peter Rabbit; 'don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor'. I'm more inclined to find wise old Mrs. Rabbit over Kierkegaard, even if she is a rabbit.

Doing nice things.

Yesterday I helped a woman pick up all her books and flurries of paper after she dropped them in the corridor that was spattered with the rain from the underside of student shoes and when i learnt she was one of the professors at the uni, we carried our armfuls to her office. We chatted about something i don't remember now and she lent me a book from her little mountain on one side of the room. Afterwards, holding this creased literary gratitude (Domestic Peace by Balzac if you wanted to know), i wondered on the way to my next lecture whether reciprocity was in fact a good thing. And by good i mean... Good. Not Good in conventionally competitive contrast to Bad but rather the Good of progress - good for social order and utilitarianism, good for the Soul, our fragile malleable Souls, preoccupied with self-betterment and Doing The Right Thing (which i was brought up being conditioned to do without really knowing why, for a very long time, until the day came when i somehow grew a Heart like the Tin Man and morality suddenly made so much more sense - speaking of, how have i not yet read the book by L. Frank Baum? I actually had to google this.).

I can understand why this book-teetering professor felt the ancient compulsion to repay me for my help, even if it made me thankful to incoherency (oh, wow, are you sure? i mean, ah, thank you, but, blah). Reciprocity is an old concept, reaching way back when the first man thought that a cow was worth a sack of the nice farmer's rice - from bartering, to trade, to paying a pneumatic (a word i grew fond of reading Huxley's Brave New World) drunk female in the back of a club to take off her clothes. Confucius summarised all his philosophy on this idea (of reciprocity not whoring) - Muslims too value mutual obligation; if a man saves another's life then he is in debt until he too can save him in return. Buddhism also depicts the world as a perpetual cycle of cause and affect (called samsara or Karma) - kindness and gratitude in perfect balance, as well as punishment and justice. Saving a life, inviting someone over for dinner, picking books up off the floor; all the time this same notion of rewarding kindness. As though without a reward, we might let a man die or pass by a woman struggling with too many books and no trolley.

((Interestingly, there is (was?) a law in France and Germany called the Good Samaritan law where you're duty-bound to help someone - by which it means that you can be held lawfully responsible and therefore prosecuted for inaction (no idea how and if this is/was ever enforced). It was ironically (probably not ironically - i hardly know when to use that word) introduced by the Nazis in the 1940s.))

Reciprocity is hardly universal though - there are native american cultures who believe that good deeds and kindness are natural functions in a person's life requiring no reward or reciprocity (possibly due to the family-community structure?). This actually institutes a more favourable account of humanity - as though we are fundamentally superheroes like Bruce Wayne hiding altruism in a Bat costume. I would insert here the example of the Samaritan in the Bible who selflessly helped a robbed and wounded Jew on the side of the road - but we forget the two men before the nice Samaritan whom both left the poor man to die. Statistically then, two thirds of the world are heartless (my statistics classes tells me this is a bad sample pool in which to infer a population). Then again, there is only one Batman against the hundreds of villains he defeats in the comics.

It comes down to how we choose to see the acts of man. So am i Human or Batman?

Europe; a history by Norman Davies

Peninsula, Environment and Prehistory

It is environment; climate, geography, topography, seasons, etc. that underlies the success of empires. 'The empire of climate', wrote Montesquieu in 1748, 'is the first of all empires'; and he proceeded to show that the European climate had no rival. It favoured requirements of primitive agriculture, psychology (opportunity and challenge), trade and travel, terrain (The Great European Plain, the Mountains, the Mediterranean, the mainland trunk).
It's absence of extremes is attributed to the success of human evolution in Europa.

Sculpture of Atlas, Praza do Toural, Santiago del Compostela. In Greek mythology, Atlas was the poor burdened Titan who supported the heavens. Archimedes remarked; "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the Earth."

Hellas, Ancient Greece

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the thing of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about... Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs, but in the affairs of the state as well... We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. Others are brave out of ignorance, and, when they begin to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.

- Pericles (c.495-429), his funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War; pulsing with pride at the freedom and high culture of his native city Athens - the zenith of Greek civilisation in which political, intellectual, and cultural energies peaked.

I like looking at old things. It makes me sad.
What's good about sad?
It's happy - for deep people.
- Sally Sparrow in 'Blink', Dr Who.

Of all the people we do not love, why do we love those we do?

Odysseus and the Sirens - John William Waterhouse

I want moral certainty.

Should not right and wrong be clear simply by virtue of being good? Is it not enough to have empathy? If moral certainty requires such meticulous critical thinking and a lifetime of wisdom, is it only for the idle? Only for the wise? Then what purpose could it serve for the rest of us?

If morality even exists then it should be understood instinctly if it is to be utilised. Then what of the genetic morality that we absorb from parents and the social world? Could that be the true ethical tenet for it has more or less prevailed through the timeline of man? Is something right simply because enough people believe it to be so?

And how do we recognise truth - perhaps we once stumbled across Moral Truth and kept going? If we cannot recognise truth then doesn't this suggest that it does not exist? Atleast, it cannot serve for us a practical and reliable purpose. Perhaps what is real is the Thing underlying truth, any truth, the desire for truth. Maybe morality infact presupposes truth; to believe and strive for truth requires an idea of clarity and betterment and honesty. How easy it would be to live and act and say and believe whatever we want, to pursue only for what we selfishly yearn.

But most of don't - not even as a product of tedious introspection - we just don't; instinctually like Husserl's intuition. For most it permeates beneath every action - is this due to conditioning, or something more abstract? Those of us capable of looking out into the world and seeing people as other terrified little souls wanting love and truth and money; we actually want to live unclouded, as though human nature is perpetually inclined to a certain sort of Balance.

To exist honestly, unattached and unafraid - Heidegger calls this authenticity, the Buddhists enlightenment and the concept of Ubermensch to Nietzsche. While these are all (mostly) unattainable goals, surely it means something that they actually are goals. We aren't content to simply accept who we are and what we are born into (thrown-into-the-world Heidegger calls it). Perhaps morality is this; an indistinct code in which the outcome is always consistent but the method and means to achieving it is in a perpetual, cyclical flux. Is this certainty enough?

But i've accidentally started to believe that the pursuit of certainty leads me further away from it. Moral certainty requires absence of doubt; belief without scepticism. Belief through faith, and i don't have faith.

Can i learn faith?

Velocity of yearning

You collect knowledge the way others do objects, as a possession.

By Miles Pasick

447th Squadron B-25s fly past the erupting Vesuvius in 1944

Phillipe Petit - the Twin Towers

Sorry about the bony elbows

sorry we lived here,

sorry about the scene

at the bottom of the stairwell

and how I ruined everything

by saying it out loud.

Especially that,

but I should have known. You see,

I take the parts that I remember and stitch

them back together to make a creature that

will do what I say or love me back.

- Richard Siken

eccedentesiast (noun): a person who fakes a smile

her bed is a boat

(Almost) three words i like today

Pyrrhonic: to remain in a state of perpetual inquiry, disputing the possibility of attaining truth by sensory apprehension, reason, or the two combined, and thence inferred the need for total suspension of judgement - an epoche (the theoretical moment where all judgements about the existence of the external world, and consequently all action in the world, are suspended). Even the statement that nothing can be known is dogmatic (religious belief).

Ataraxia: for the Epicureans, ataraxia was synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person. It signifies the state of robust tranquility that derives from eschewing faith in an afterlife, not fearing the gods because they are distant and unconcerned with us, avoiding politics and vexatious people, surrounding oneself with trustworthy and affectionate friends and, most importantly, being an affectionate, virtuous person worthy of trust.

'He believes he has a soul and like many a possessor of such a thing, he is made to pay the price for this belief' - Margaret Atwood

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul - Pablo Neruda

How much might they not be telling us about themselves, simply because we hadn't asked?

Nocturne of the Limax Maximus by Paula Hayes @ MoMA, New York —
Egg

 

"For a time it was believed that the substances which are associated with living things were so marvelous that they could not be made by hand, from inorganic materials. This is not at all true — they are just the same as the substances made in inorganic chemistry, but more complicated arrangements of atoms are involved."

Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, Ch. 3: The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences, 49

Bridge of Immortals, Yellow Mountain, China

Tectonic Plate Gap between Europe and North America