Tuesday, December 26, 2006

To Read

To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers."
Orhan Pamuk

Thursday, December 07, 2006

All my tendencies are deadly ones

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless, world in which everything is always devastating and deadly.
Quote from The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

My melancholy

I have one intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me . My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
—Søren Kierkegaard (from Either/Or)

Friday, December 01, 2006

A Gloomy View

There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims (tr. T. Bailey Saunders)

Sunday, November 12, 2006

The Melancholic

Dissimulation, secretiveness appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself--these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.
Susan Sontag - Under the Sign of Saturn

Monday, November 06, 2006

Nothing Lasts

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.
- Henri Frederic Amiel

Sadness

“There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass”
Charles Kuralt

Friday, October 27, 2006

The Church of the Non-Believers

MY FRIENDS, I MUST ASK YOU AN IMPORTANT QUESTION TODAY: Where do you stand on God?

It's a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I'm afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position.

This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking.

Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith...more here

Saturday, October 07, 2006

In Time

We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, so little done -- of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep, as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, chap. 33

Sunday, October 01, 2006

The End of the World As They Know It

What do Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers have in common? They’re all hot for the apocalypse...more here

A Metaphysical Materialist

Who was the real Walter Benjamin? Was it the otherworldly aesthete who believed, along with the German Romantics, that literature has a redemptive purpose, and who was indifferent to whether a literary work was actually read, since it is ultimately a metaphysical end in itself?

Or was the real Benjamin the self-proclaimed "strategist in the literary struggle," the follower of Bertolt Brecht who, during the 1920s and '30s, became enamored of Soviet literature and film, with their odes to factory work and agricultural collectivization, dismissing art for art's sake as an unconscionable bourgeois indulgence in an age of class struggle?

Or was it the passionate Kabbalist, the friend of Gershom Scholem who proclaimed that his interpretive ideal was the Talmudic doctrine according to which every Torah passage contained forty-nine levels of meaning; who pronounced, without a trace of irony, that any philosophy that could not foretell the future by reading coffee grounds was worthless; who, following the fall of France in 1940, argued that Marxism could prevail only if it enlisted the help of theology; and who claimed that the goal of revolution was not so much the emancipation of future generations as the resurrection of vanquished ancestors? ...more here

Friday, September 15, 2006

Melancholy



Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.
- Victor Hugo

Melancholy sees the worst of things,--things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.
- Christian Nestell Bovee

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth,
A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown;
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
- Thomas Gray,
Elegy in a Country Churchyard--The Epitaph

Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!
There's nought in this life sweet,
If man were wise to see 't,
But only melancholy,
Oh, sweetest melancholy!
- Dr. William Strode, Song in Praise of Melancholy,
as given in Malone's Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, manuscript no. 21

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Quotes related to books, reading

Anyone who has a book collection wants for nothing.

--Cicero
Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculations at a standstill.

--Barbara Tuchman
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

--S.I. Hiyakawa
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

--Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!

--William Gladstone
Read in order to Live.

--Gustave Flaubert

Monday, September 04, 2006

Life

I laugh and I cry, and I’m haunted by
Things I never meant or wished to say.
Bob Dylan

Sunday, September 03, 2006

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death

Newsflash: we're all going to die. But here are 20 things you didn't know about kicking the bucket...more here

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Currently Reading

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Part 2 1931-1934

The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living , but that suicide is not worth the trouble. - page 542

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Why Booksellers Are Going Belly Up

Balloons, sky-blue and gold and arterial red, bobbed against Cody's glass facade the afternoon before the store closed. July sunshine basted the hordes jostling inside, plucking strawberries from trays, eyes darting as if to say, "I'm making history." News cameras swiveled. A fat man with a sheathed knife at his waist, leather hat strung with small animal skulls, perused the horror-fiction section. A combo played Parisian bistro tunes: accordion and fiddle, happy-sad. The shelves upstairs were bare.

One could be picky and say this was Cody's Telegraph to differentiate the 50-year-old Berkeley, Calif. flagship from the two other Cody's stores, one of which opened on Berkeley's Fourth Street in 1997, the other in San Francisco last fall. Neither of them appears doomed, but the July 10 closure of Cody's Telegraph Avenue store garnered extraordinary attention. Local and national media -- The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, MSNBC, to name a few -- have proved generous with their time and ink since owner Andy Ross announced his intentions in early May. His revelation spurred fierce debates, like an endless grown-up game of Clue: What killed Cody's? Chain stores, some said. Changing times, others surmised. Cultural illiteracy. Greed. The Internet. Panhandlers. That missing parking lot. George W. Bush...more here

Thank Who Very Much?

Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. We who live after progress, after Marxism, and after the Holocaust have stopped believing that the world is being transformed by reason and democracy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all. Alone as never before, in a universe scientifically better understood than ever, we find little in its almost-infinite vastness to guide us towards what our lives mean and how we should live them.

To answer these questions anew, agnostics, atheists and secularists must absorb the experience of the twentieth century and the issues of the twenty-first. We must face today's concerns about forces beyond our control and our own responsibility, shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality even while, especially in the United States, religion is being trumpeted as essential to living ethically, formulate new ways of coming to terms with death, and explore what hope can mean after the collapse of Enlightenment anticipations...more here

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Living the absurd

"Living the absurd… means a total lack of hope (which is not the same as despair), a permanent reflection (which is not the same as renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which is not the same as juvenile anxiety)."
Albert Camus

Monday, August 14, 2006

Why Worry?

There are only two things to worry about.
Either you are well, or you are sick.
If you are well, then there is nothing to worry about.
but if you are sick, there are two things to worry about.
Either you will get well or you will die,
if you get well, there is nothing to worry about.
If you die, there are two things to worry about.
Either you will go to heaven or hell .
If you go to heaven, there is nothing
to worry about, but if you go to
hell, you'll be so damn busy
shaking hands with friends, you
won't have time to worry.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Writers and artists confronting the end

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this aging reader, works written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called “Last Works/Late Style.” Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said’s widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” ($25). Said’s central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven’s late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an “idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.”...more here

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Personality

Personality Test Results

Extraversion |||| 16%
Stability |||| 16%
Orderliness |||||||||||||||| 63%
Accommodation |||||||||||||| 56%
Interdependence |||||||||||||| 56%
Intellectual || 10%
Mystical |||| 16%
Artistic |||| 16%
Religious |||||||||||| 50%
Hedonism || 10%
Materialism || 10%
Narcissism || 10%
Adventurousness |||| 16%
Work ethic || 10%
Self absorbed |||||||||| 36%
Conflict seeking |||| 16%
Need to dominate |||| 16%

Romantic |||||||||||||||||||| 90%
Avoidant |||||||||||||| 56%
Anti-authority |||||| 30%
Wealth |||||| 23%
Dependency || 10%
Change averse |||||||||||||| 56%
Cautiousness |||||||||| 36%
Individuality |||||||||||| 43%
Sexuality |||||||||| 36%
Peter pan complex |||||||||| 36%
Physical security |||||| 23%
Physical fitness |||||||||||| 50%
Histrionic |||||||||||| 43%
Paranoia |||||||||||||||| 63%
Vanity |||||||||||| 43%
Hypersensitivity |||||||||||||||| 70%
Female cliche |||||||||||| 43%

Stability results were very low which suggests you are extremely worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.

Orderliness results were moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly organized, reliable, neat, and hard working at the expense of flexibility, efficiency, spontaneity, and fun.

Extraversion results were very low which suggests you are extremely reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.

trait snapshot:
depressed, introverted, neat, needs things to be extremely clean, observer, perfectionist, not self revealing, does not make friends easily, suspicious, irritable, hates large parties, follows the rules, worrying, does not like to stand out, fragile, phobic, submissive, dislikes leadership, cautious, takes precautions, focuses on hidden motives, , solitary, familiar with the dark side of life, hard working, emotionally sensitive, prudent, altruistic, heart over mind, unadventurous...more here

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Hence, all you vain delights

Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly,
There's nought in this life sweet,
If man were wise to see't
But only melancholy,
Oh, sweetest melancholy.
Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes,
A sigh that piercing mortifies,
A look that's fast'ned to the ground,
A tongue chain'd up without a sound.
Fountain-heads, and pathless groves;
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are warmly hous'd, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a parting groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon;
Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley,
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.
John Fletcher (1579-1625)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

The God Factor


Over the course of five years, Chicago Sun-Times' religion writer Cathleen Falsani interviewed 32 well-known people—among them intellectuals, artists, political pundits and rockers—for her book, "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People." Subjects like Bono, Playboy founder and editor-in-chief Hugh Hefner and singer Annie Lennox all opened up to her questions about their individual faith and deeply held beliefs and doubts. Interference.com got to return the favor, asking her about the difference between religion and spirituality, how 9/11 impacted our faith, and even the similarity between church and a good U2 concert...more here

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

A Terrific Urge

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

--Raymond Carver

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Read Books

Read books on the philosophy of science and the myth of creationism.
Read books on the myth of creationism.
Read books on the fourteen-billion-year story of cosmic and human history.
Read books on the Emergence of Life on Earth.
Read books on biology and genetics.
Read books on Darwin and Evolution.
Read books on the great mass extinction of the past.
Read great books on the causes of collapse of societies.
Read great books on the questions of life, death and ethics from a humanist or christian perspective.
Read great books on the history of religions and about religion.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Currently reading


Kierkegaard's Writings, XVI: Works of Love
What marvellous strength love has! The most powerful word which has been said, yes, God's creative word, is: "Be". But the most powerful word any human being has ever said is, if said by a lover: I abide (p. 286).

This is my favourite love poem

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoveres to new worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally,
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.
The Good Morrow by John Donne

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Nausea

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the fiends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes.(...)

The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea

Kierkegaard's "Mystery Of Unrighteousness" In The Information Age

"The world's fundamental misfortune," the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, "is ...the fact that with each great discovery ...the human race is enveloped ... in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody's, which belong to none and yet to all." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2650] The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having "destitute" relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. "What rules the world," Kierkegaard writes, "is... the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2166] The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear...more here

Fragments from a History of Ruin

For the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

For the Renaissance, the ruin was first of all a legible remnant, a repository of written knowledge. Classical ruins had preserved a certain stratum of the linguistic culture of Greece and Rome: the inscriptions on monuments, tombs, and stelae. Other mute objects—fragments of statuary, columns, bits of orphaned arch or broken pediment—composed in themselves a kind of script made of gesture, line, and ornament. In 1796, the French archaeologist Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy would ask, "What is the antique in Rome if not a great book whose pages have been destroyed or ripped out by time, it being left to modern research to fill in the blanks, to bridge the gaps?" But already, at the end of the fifteenth century, the rubble of the classical past had been figured as a sort of scattered cipher: a text that was alternately readable and utterly mysterious...more here

John Donne

The picture of John Donne "in the pose of a melancholy lover", which was recently bought by the National Portrait Gallery, has once again fixed a particular image of the poet in the public mind. He is soulful and amorous (the folded arms and sensual mouth), theatrical (the wide-brimmed black hat), dressy (the lacy collar and furred cuff), and enigmatic (the deep background shadows). And if that doesn't sound intriguing enough, there's more. An inscription bowed into a semi-circle round the top of the portrait reworks a phrase from a Latin psalm which can be translated as "O Lady lighten our darkness". Does this mean the picture was originally intended for a lover, or is it a kind of prayer to the Virgin Mary, and therefore also a reference to Donne's Catholic background? We can't be sure. Like so much else about Donne, the inscription is ambiguous - as much a fusion of "contraries" as the man himself.

Donne was born in 1572, the son of Catholic parents who understood that if they wanted to get on in the world they would have to play down or actually disguise their faith...more here

I Will Bear Witness

I Will Bear Witness. This is the single most important document from the era of National Socialism. It gives an account of every day of Hitler's 13-year dictatorship, written by a German-Jewish convert to Protestantism who had married a heroic Protestant woman, and who briefly imagined that his dual loyalty (to employ an otherwise suspect phrase) might win him some immunity. Swiftly disabused on that score, Klemperer resolved to depict his beloved Germany's collapse into barbarism.

The diary possesses three dimensions that are of great interest to us. By its portrayal of innumerable acts of decency and solidarity on the part of ordinary Germans, it seems to rebut the Daniel Jonah Goldhagen diatribe about "willing executioners." By its agonizing description of the steady and pitiless erosion of German Jewry, it puts to shame all those who doubt--whatever the argument may be over numbers or details--that Hitler's state had a coldly evolved plan of extirpation. And it forces one to reconsider the Allied policy of "area bombing."...more here

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Her Melancholy

It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother, too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before. "Do, my pretty Olivia," cried she, "let us have that little melancholy air your papa was so fond of. Your sister Sophy has already obliged us. Do, child; it will please your old father." She complied in a manner so exquisitely pathetic as moved me.

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom--is to die.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), ch. xxiv

Sonnet XXI

Go! cruel tyrant of the human breast
To other hearts, thy burning arrows bear;
Go, where fond hope, and fair illusion rest!
Ah! why should love inhabit with despair!
Like the poor maniac I linger here,
Still haunt the scene, where all my treasure lies;
Still seek for flowers, where only thorns appear,
"And drink delicious poison from her eyes!"
Tow'rds the deep gulph that opens on my flight
I hurry forward, passion's helpless salve!
And scorning reason's mild and sober light,
Pursue the path that leads me to the grave!
So round the flame the giddy insect flies,
And courts the fatal fire, by which it dies!
Charlotte Smith (1786)

Saturday, July 15, 2006

The Bible, Culture and Nick Cave

Debates on the relation between culture and the Bible are locked into two restrictive models: either the Bible is a source for subsequent appropriations, or it is the goal that one must attain through the thicket of those appropriations. In order to trouble this two-way street, I explore the words and music of Nick Cave, focusing on the way he controls interpretation of his work and where that control breaks down. At this moment Cave provides an unwitting insight into another way to view the relation of the Bible and culture, one that operates in terms of “strategies of containment.”...more here

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Books

And finally, one must consider how great the ease of learning
there is in books, how yeilding, how trusty!
How safely we reveal, without shyness, in the face of our books
the poverty of our human ignorance!
They are teachers who instruct us without switches or rods,
without slaps or anger, without notice of rags or riches.
If you approach them, they are not asleep;
If you ask a question, they do not hide;
They do not mutter at you if you make a mistake;
When you are ignorant, they do not know how to laugh at you.
Richard de Bury (Philobiblion, I, 9)

Definition

A dead atheist is someone who's all dressed up with no place to go.

And God said

"And God said: 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan.'" -- George Burns

Friday, May 26, 2006

The Simpsons as philosophy

The Simpsons is more than a funny cartoon - it reveals truths about human nature that rival the observations of great philosophers from Plato to Kant... while Homer sets his house on fire, says philosopher Julian Baggini... more here

Sunday, May 21, 2006

No Mourning

We carry in us seeds of all the gods
the germ of death and germ of happiness,
whoever divides them: the words and things,
whoever mixes them: agony and the place
where they end, wood and flowing tears,
for a few hours, a pitiful home.

There can’t be any mourning. Too far, too wide,
too unfeeling bed and tears,
no yes, or no
birth and bodily pain and belief
a nameless wave, a flicker
a supernatural thing, stirring in sleep,
agitated bed and tears—
go to sleep!


by Gottfried Benn
—Translated from the German by Teresa Iverson

Online Kierkegaard Links

Kierkegaard thought we should undertake philosophy with fear and trembling. This has led some to ask why we should read him at all. This site is set up with the wish that it might lead you, the reader, through the riddles and mirrors by which Kierkegaard hoped to guide us back to and beyond ourselves in primitivity...more here

Bibliography

Research on Evil: An Annotated Bibliography...more here

E. M. Cioran

Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who lived most of his life in Paris. He is the author of many books—essays and aphorisms.

Selections from Cioran here

Fear

The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula...more here

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Time

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
--Hector Berlioz

The Law

“Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.” —Edward W. Howe

Brutality, War Crimes, Genocide, and Rape

Imagine if the leader of a modern country decided his people required land and then proceeded to invade neighbouring countries. Imagine if in some areas he enslaved entire cities, and in others, he ordered his army to completely annihilate the population, first killing soldiers, then killing non-combatants in cold blood (women, children, even babies). Imagine if in some cities he allowed his men to force women they found attractive to have sex with them. Imagine if in some cities he plundered all the goods he found, while in others he simply burnt them to the ground. Imagine if this leader even went so far as to kill livestock for no purpose other than spite. Imagine if this leader also commanded his troops to desecrate the places of worship in the lands he had conquered. Then imagine if his followers kept records of his campaigns, recording with pride the killing of 12,000 people on one day, and 25,000 on another...more here

Monday, May 01, 2006

Last night

Last night I dreamed I died .

Perfect Evolution (and the Buried Soul)

In a culture increasingly defined by our ability to mix and match at will—blending pirated elements of old songs to create “mash-ups,” blending DNA from different plants and animals, blending elements of various subcultures, eras, and ethnic groups—vampires have clearly ceased to be villains and have become one more exciting style to adopt. Sure, dressing like a vampire is fun for the goths, and rooting for vampires (they kill people, but they have such lovely angst) is a blast for Rice fans—but a true mix-and-match era should hold out the promise of actually being a vampire...more here

Romantics

Joseph Koerner's book Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape offers a useful summary of Romanticism. Its artists tended to have:

- a heightened sensitivity to the natural world
- a belief in nature's correspondence to the mind
- a focus on the subjective
- a passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate and the obscure
- a desire to be lost in nature's infinity
- an infatuation with death
- a preference for night over day

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

More coffee

“Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”
MICHELET, JULES (1798-1874)

Conversation

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.
Professor Michael Oakeshott

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Scientology

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars he should start his own religion."
L Ron Hubbard

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

The Truth

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
- Mark Twain"

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

A Clear Midnight


THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

Walt Whitman

A reflection upon death.

thanatopsis (than-uh-TOP-sis) noun

A reflection upon death.

[From Greek thanatos (death) + -opsis (appearance, view).]

Thanatos is the Greek personification of death; thanatophobia is an abnormal
fear of death. Thanatopsis is the title of an acclaimed poem by poet and
journalist William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements;
To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world,—with kings,
The powerful of the earth,—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man! The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings,—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest; and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
William Cullen Bryant. 1794–1878

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Cats


Both ardent lovers and austere scholars
Love in their mature years
The strong and gentle cats, pride of the house,
Who like them are sedentary and sensitive to cold.

Friends of learning and sensual pleasure,
They seek the silence and the horror of darkness;
Erebus would have used them as his gloomy steeds:
If their pride could let them stoop to bondage.

When they dream, they assume the noble attitudes
Of the mighty sphinxes stretched out in solitude,
Who seem to fall into a sleep of endless dreams;

Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks,
And particles of gold, like fine grains of sand,
Spangle dimly their mystic eyes.
Cats
Charles Baudelaire

Friday, April 07, 2006

faith/science

Warning: The surgeon general may determine that prayer is hazardous to your health. That's what can happen when faith sets out to prove its power through science...more here

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

The Case for Evolution

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud refers approvingly to a 19th-century German playwright, Christian Garber, who gave this advice to a would-be suicide: "We cannot fall out of this world. We are in it once and for all." That caution applies to us all: We'll eventually die, but aside from that, the world is irretrievably with us. We are stuck in the muck and glory of it all, living creatures among many, biological to the core, created by our biology no less than is a dandelion or a dolphin. We cannot fall out of it, nor is there any reason to do so. For Darwin there was "grandeur in this view of life," in which all living things are linked both by historical continuity — that is, common ancestry — and as the products of the same fundamental process: evolution...more here

Monday, March 27, 2006

There is no point

There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist.
Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life

What is this relish for living, la joie de vivre, they talk about nowadays? The hunger for God, the thirst for immortality, for survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful pleasure-taking in the life that is fleeting and does not abide. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life be unending, which most often leads us to long for death. ‘If I am to be altogether annihilated,’ we say to ourselves, ‘the world is finished for me, it is over. And why not let it come to an end as soon as possible, so that no new consciousness will have to come into being and suffer the tormenting deceit of a transient and apparential existence? If the illusion of life is destroyed and life for life’s sake or for the sake of others who must also die does not satisfy our soul, then what is the point of living? Death is our best release.’ And so we sing dirges to death, the never-ending respite, simply from fear of it, and call it a liberation.
Miguel de Unamuno.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

How Long ?


How long's a tear take take to dry ?

Friday, March 24, 2006

The Poetry Of The Corpse

Dust is the signature of lost time/a mix of boredom and death.
Genesis iii 19 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

To Do Today

"So much to do today:/kill memory, kill pain,/turn heart into a stone,/and yet prepare to live again."
Anna Akhmatova

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Out of the world!


The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery,
Swift to be hurl'd --
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!
"The Bridge of Sighs" by Thomas Hood

I love ....

'Tis Winter, and I love to read indoors,
When the Moon hangs her crescent up on high;
While on the window shutters the wind roars,
And storms like furies pass remorseless by.
How pleasant on a feather bed to lie,
Or, sitting by the fire, in fancy soar
With Dante or with Milton to regions high,
Or read fresh volumes we've not seen before,
Or o'er old Burton's Melancholy pore.
From John Clare, The Winter's Come

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll

They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this Photoshopped age of unreliable narrators, much remains the same. The assassination of President John Kennedy, the Crime of the Last Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands—yet exactly what happened remains in dispute. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, fellow traveler of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission found that Oswald, who two days later would be murdered by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone...more here

SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST

In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice declares that she cannot believe impossible things, the White Queen advises her to practise. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”...more here

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

God is back in fashion among intellectuals

"The ostracised believer – stronger than all!" This was the title of a speech held in the Stuttgarter Literaturhaus and subsequently reprinted in a German newspaper. Its author was Feridun Zaimoglu, a German writer of Turkish origin, 40 years old and recently distinguished with the Chamisso Prize. Zaimoglu calls the species of non-believers who have been condemned to downfall by their proper name: the Enlightened. "The Enlightened pull angry faces when they hear that there's a higher power influencing the plight of mankind or the world's cycles. But God, declared for dead, considered a trap for those dumb enough to believe in the thereafter, survives every trial and every renewal. Maybe it's time to do a little reversal, to consider the Enlightenment as the opium of the bourgeois and thereby devalue every object that was and is not a ware."...more here

Monday, February 20, 2006

Fulfilment

“To study something of great age until one grows familar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body--are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of good land--all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intuitions are confirmed. It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure perpetually breeding the only enduring things; it is excellent to see the crimes we know ground under the slow wheels whose ponderous advance we can hardly note during the flash of one human life. One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.” —Hillaire Belloc, The Old Road

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Call Me Digital

Imagine, at the end of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, that Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod kill the white whale instead of the other way around. That Ishmael is not alone in his escape. Steven Olsen-Smith, an associate professor of English at Boise State University, has reconstructed textual evidence that strongly suggests that Melville, whose 1851 novel stands as one of the great achievements of American literature and an enduring study of doomed monomania, entertained just such a scenario...more here

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Sadness

Every so often, sadness leaks from the universe. *Because the earth cannot contain the sorrows we inflict on each other*.
We are overcome by waves of sadness, welling up from the earth, suffusing our beings, and we cry, seemingly without reason.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

An Atheist Manifesto

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?...more here

Second Person

Some key moments in philosophical history illustrate the neglect or denial of the importance of the Second Person to philosophical thought with a resulting distortion of problem and available answers. Here are some examples.
(1) The Meno

In the Meno Plato produces one of the best known and least plausible of his arguments. He purports to show that 'we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection'. He demonstrates his point by eliciting geometric theorems from an uneducated slave boy by pure questioning. He invites Meno 'Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers.' For good measure he uses the 'knowledge is remembrance' thesis to prove the immortality of the soul: 'And if there have been always true thoughts in him, both at the time when he was and was not a man, which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him, his soul must have always possessed this knowledge, for he always either was or was not a man?.. And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal.' ...more here

Poetry and the Science of Mind

Science has long been the dominant intellectual force in Western societies. Some fields of empirical enquiry, from the cosmos to the neurone, are necessarily scientific. In other fields, though, for example, concerned with the nature of our humanity and our relationship with the natural world, scientists also seem to have achieved more than have poets or philosophers or the social scientists who practise psychology and sociology. Perhaps, one reason for the dominance of science has been the willing submission to its ascendancy by academic disciplines that were once regarded as subject areas in the arts and humanities...more here

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Poetry

" No man was ever yet a great poet,
without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge,
human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. "

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Today's word

ahimsa (uh-HIM-sah, uh-HIN-sah) noun

The principle of refraining from harming any living being.

[From Sanskrit ahimsa, from a- (not) + hinsa (injury).]
"As my conception of ahimsa went on maturing, I became more vigilant
about my thought and speech. The lines in the Anthem:
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their policies,
Frustrate their knavish tricks
particularly jarred upon my sentiments of Ahimsa."
M.K. Gandhi; The Story of My Experiments With Truth; 1927.

Monday, February 06, 2006

The Origins of Life

Twenty-five years ago, Francis Crick, who co--discovered the structure of DNA, published a provocative book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Crick speculated that early in Earth’s history a civilization from a distant planet had sent a spaceship to Earth bearing the seeds of life. Whether or not Crick was serious about his proposal, it dramatized the difficulties then plaguing the theory that life originated from chemical reactions on Earth. Crick noted two major questions for the theory. The first one—seemingly unanswerable at the time—was how genetic polymers such as RNA came to direct protein synthesis, a process fundamental to life. After all, in contemporary life-forms, RNA translates genetic information encoded by DNA into instructions for making proteins...more here

Eden and Evolution

Religious critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws. But are they right that it threatens belief in a loving God?



The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . .

-- Isaiah 11:6

What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.

-- Charles Darwin

Ricky Nguyen and Mariama Lowe never really believed in evolution to begin with. But as they took their seats in Room CC-121 at Northern Virginia Community College on November 2, they fully expected to hear what students usually hear in any Biology 101 class: that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was true...more here

Monday, January 30, 2006

Feelings and Thoughts

There are two kinds of obscurity; one arises from a lack of feelings and thoughts, which have been replaced by words; the other from an abundance of feelings and thoughts, and the inadequacy of words to express them.
--Alexander Pushkin

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with a muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead,
Scribbling on the sky the message `He Is Dead',
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W. H. Auden, April 1936

Common Sense

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense."
-- Buddha

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

The Days of Wine and Roses

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream
Ernest Dowson

Life

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy ;

In general, "as the heaven, so is our life, sometimes fair, sometimes overcast, tempestuous, and serene; as in a rose, flowers and prickles; in the year itself, a temperate summer sometimes, a hard winter, a drought, and then again pleasant showers: so is our life intermixed with joys, hopes, fears, sorrows, calumnies: Invicem cedunt dolor et voluptas," there is a succession of pleasure and pain.

Kierkegaard's tomb

Kierkegaard, Journals (May 14, 1847, tr. Alexander Dru):

I wish that on my grave might be put "the individual."

Here is a photograph of Kierkegaard's tomb. It does not say "the individual," at least on the part visible in the photograph.

What do you want on your tombstone?

Sunday, January 01, 2006

A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT

A Little Definition: Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
A Little Reflection: Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.
A Little Proverb: If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before!
A Little Question: I love to give homemade gifts... which one of my kids do you want?
A Little Wisdom: If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.