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.