Philosophy in the Morgue

Winter, 1945

2009-01-23T10:27:00.000-06:00

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

Andrew Wyeth

Down

2008-12-28T13:40:00.001-06:00

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Mum and Dad

2008-12-23T11:08:00.000-06:00

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
– Philip Larkin

Stillness

2008-11-21T05:52:00.000-06:00

"It is difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle and difficult for the man of the world to find stillness; whether he is powerful or insignificant, it is difficult to find stillness in life's noise... [and] whoever says that this stillness does not exist is merely making noise. Have you ever really heard that anyone in stillness made up his mind that it does not exist, even though you probably have heard big words and loud talk and noisy doings to get rid of stillness in order to have, instead of conscience and stillness and God's voice delivering judgment in stillness, a nature-echo from the crowd, a confused collective scream, a general opinion in which one, out of cowardice, fearing for oneself, is not alone. But you, my listener, if you fear this stillness, even though you are doing your best to have a conscience (without stillness conscience does not exist at all) and to have a good conscience, then keep on, then endure it; this stillness is not the stillness of death in which you perish, it is not the sickness unto death -- it is the transition to life."
--------------------------------------------------------

~Source: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions: "On the Occasion of a Confession" (1845)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

My wife

2008-10-16T16:37:00.000-05:00

My wife. She looked straight at me one day. That afternoon, a little over a year ago, we made our son, and I thought that that’s how all people come together. A person arrives out of nowhere, for no special reason or for a reason that’s unclear, and offers himself or herself to someone else, who finds it perfectly natural, since that’s how all people come together, and in that great moment they both give themselves to each other for life, without looking back or thinking twice, they both give themselves to each other for life, since from that great moment on, the rest of life will be equally natural, inexplicable, and grand.

The Implacable Order of Things - By José Luís Peixoto
Nan. A Talese/Doubleday, 2008

The cemetery

2008-08-13T07:47:00.001-05:00

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Final Reward

2008-08-13T07:41:00.001-05:00

“The final reward of the dead - to die no more.”

Nietzsche

Death

2008-08-13T07:29:00.002-05:00

“I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

A Man Doesn't Have Time in his Life

2008-08-07T11:54:00.000-05:00

A Man Doesn't Have Time in his Life
Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.
...............................

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.
...............................

A man doesn't have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.
...............................

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains.
...............................

He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there's time for everything.

The Problem

2008-07-07T11:35:00.000-05:00

We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”

Read

2008-07-01T09:35:00.000-05:00

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. . . . Certainly we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.

Henry D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849

Religious Beliefs

2008-06-09T08:22:00.000-05:00

All religious beliefs prompt rejection. Souls are reincarnated? Ridiculous. The Bible is divinely inspired? Dangerous nonsense. Muhammad is the prophet of God? Poppycock. Jesus rose from the dead? Absurd. It is the common fate of doctrines to be dismissed; you’d almost think that’s what they were made for.

Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History, p. ix.

All men are bores

2008-05-04T10:49:00.000-05:00

"All men are bores. The word itself suggests the possibility of a subdivision. It may just as well indicate a man who bores others as one who bores himself. Those who bore others are the mob, the crowd, the infinite multitude of men in general. Those who bore themselves are the elect, the aristocracy; and it is curious that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others."

~Source: Either/Or (1843)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

Bookshelves

2008-02-27T16:22:00.002-06:00

“Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be.”

Ezra Klein

"I Will Follow You Into the Dark"

2008-02-27T16:01:00.002-06:00

Love of mine some day you will die
But I'll be close behind
I'll follow you into the dark

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
To illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
"Son fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
To illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark

You and me have seen everything to see
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes are all worn down
The time for sleep is now
It's nothing to cry about
Cause we'll hold each other soon
The blackest of rooms

If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
To illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark
Then I'll follow you into the dark

Death Cab for Cutie

( from the album Plans on Atlantic Records )

The Bibliophile

2007-12-13T16:35:00.000-06:00

It is all so sad, a library of unread books.

The Garden of Love

2007-12-04T18:39:00.000-06:00

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

William Blake - “The Garden of Love”

Thought-of-the-Day

2007-09-19T06:46:00.000-05:00

"Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore."
Cecil Beaton

Tears

2007-09-19T06:44:00.000-05:00

“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-189

Meaning of life?

2007-09-17T14:46:00.000-05:00

A timely reminder to all of us who like collecting books!

Meaning of life?
Collecting books? No, read them!
Reading them? No, think about!
Thinking about? No, do something for God and for your neighbour!
—Karl Barth, Basle, 2.11.1954

Useless to resist

2007-09-03T13:44:00.000-05:00

"A dying man needs to die as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist."
Stewart Alsop

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

2007-09-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

Deep in my heart

2007-08-20T09:17:00.000-05:00

Deep in my heart I bear grief, outwardly I must be serene. I conceal my dear deep grief within, well out of sight of the world, and it is felt by the soul alone, for the body does not deserve it. As the spark, free and bright, hides itself within flint, so I bear deep grief within.

Eric Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf

Faith

2007-06-23T06:19:00.000-05:00

“All faith is autopsy”

Søren Kierkegaard—Journals, 1844

Atheist's Bible

2007-06-20T05:27:00.000-05:00

"All thinking men are atheists," Ernest Hemingway famously wrote. True? Here are quips, quotes, and questions from a distinguished assortment of geniuses and jokers, giving readers a chance to decide for themselves....

When I think of all the harm [the bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Gertrude Stein

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are skeptical.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz

God is love, but get it in writing.
Gypsy Rose Lee

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw

Published June, 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers, Hardcover, 208 Pages, ISBN: 9780061349157, ISBN-10: 0061349151, List Price $16.95. by Konner, Joan

Loneliness

2007-05-31T13:59:00.001-05:00

Now it is Loneliness who comes at night
Instead of Sleep, to sit beside my bed.
Like a tired child I lie and wait her tread,
I watch her softly blowing out the light.
Motionless sitting, neither left or right
She turns, and weary, weary droops her head.
She, too, is old; she, too, has fought the fight.
So, with the laurel she is garlanded.

Through the sad dark the slowly ebbing tide
Breaks on a barren shore, unsatisfied.
A strange wind flows... then silence. I am fain
To turn to Loneliness, to take her hand,
Cling to her, waiting, till the barren land
Fills with the dreadful monotone of rain

(Katherine Mansfield)

Everything falls back to coldness

2007-05-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."

The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.

(Wallace Stevens)

Grief

2007-05-21T12:40:00.000-05:00

One day of grief is an hundred years, as Cardan observes: 'Tis carnificina hominum, angor animi, as well saith Aretaeus, a plague of the soul, the cramp and convulsion of the soul, an epitome of hell; and if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. I, Sect. 4, Memb. I (Prognosticks of Melancholy)

On the Shortness of Life

2007-05-21T12:36:00.000-05:00

Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life 3.3 (tr. John W. Basore)

The Course of Life

2007-03-01T16:06:00.001-06:00

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth? -
Most men eddy about
Here and there - eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die -
Perish; - and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

The Course of Life - Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel, lines 58-72

Solemn Sadness

2007-02-26T15:37:00.000-06:00

...the solemn sadness that dwells in all great things - in high mountains and in great men, in profound nights and in eternal poems.

Fernando Pessoa

Reading

2007-02-23T15:13:00.000-06:00

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” Joseph Brodsky said. “One of them is not reading them.”

The Pleasure Of Life

2007-02-14T11:07:00.000-06:00

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;
This is our world
All we have to do beyond that
Is to die.

Ikkyu Sojun - (1394-1481)

Works of Art

2007-02-07T10:41:00.000-06:00

"Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it -- every word, every phrase -- deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such." ·

THE CURTAIN An Essay in Seven Parts By Milan Kundera

Is anything worse

2007-01-31T17:48:00.000-06:00

ELECTRA: Is anything worse than death?
AEGISTHUS: Life, if you wish to die.

Seneca - Agamemnon

To Read

2006-12-26T10:25:00.000-06:00

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

All my tendencies are deadly ones

2006-12-07T17:10:00.000-06:00

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

2006-12-07T16:37:00.000-06:00

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)

A Gloomy View

2006-12-01T17:36:00.000-06:00

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)

The Melancholic

2006-11-12T22:09:00.000-06:00

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

Nothing Lasts

2006-11-06T15:49:00.000-06:00

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

2006-11-06T15:46:00.000-06:00

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

Charles Kuralt

The Church of the Non-Believers

2006-10-27T15:39:00.000-05:00

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

In Time

2006-10-07T15:56:00.000-05:00

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

The End of the World As They Know It

2006-10-01T19:33:00.000-05:00

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

2006-10-01T11:30:00.000-05:00

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

Melancholy

2006-09-15T18:13:00.000-05:00

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

Quotes related to books, reading

2006-09-06T22:43:00.000-05:00

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

Life

2006-09-04T16:11:00.000-05:00

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

Bob Dylan

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

2006-09-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

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

Currently Reading

2006-08-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

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

Why Booksellers Are Going Belly Up

2006-08-22T20:47:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-08-22T09:53:00.000-05:00

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

Living the absurd

2006-08-16T18:59:00.000-05:00

"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

Why Worry?

2006-08-14T14:57:00.000-05:00

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.

Writers and artists confronting the end

2006-08-09T07:32:00.000-05:00

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

Personality

2006-08-08T14:27:00.000-05:00

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

Hence, all you vain delights

2006-08-05T19:14:00.000-05:00

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)

The God Factor

2006-08-02T16:07:00.000-05:00

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

A Terrific Urge

2006-08-01T18:05:00.000-05:00

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

--Raymond Carver

Read Books

2006-07-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

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.

Currently reading

2006-07-27T20:13:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-27T20:11:00.000-05:00

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

Nausea

2006-07-25T15:36:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-25T15:33:00.000-05:00

"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

2006-07-25T15:17:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-25T15:07:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-25T10:45:00.000-05:00

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

Her Melancholy

2006-07-22T13:32:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-22T13:28:00.000-05:00

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)

The Bible, Culture and Nick Cave

2006-07-15T16:32:00.000-05:00

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

Books

2006-06-29T18:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-29T18:08:00.000-05:00

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

And God said

2006-06-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

"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

The Simpsons as philosophy

2006-05-26T15:30:00.000-05:00

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

No Mourning

2006-05-21T15:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-21T15:21:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-21T15:13:00.000-05:00

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

E. M. Cioran

2006-05-21T15:11:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-21T15:04:00.000-05:00

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

Time

2006-05-04T18:43:00.000-05:00

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

The Law

2006-05-04T18:19:00.000-05:00

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

Brutality, War Crimes, Genocide, and Rape

2006-05-04T17:51:00.000-05:00

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

Last night

2006-05-01T20:43:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed I died .

Perfect Evolution (and the Buried Soul)

2006-05-01T20:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-01T19:55:00.000-05:00

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

More coffee

2006-04-25T11:56:00.000-05:00

“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

2006-04-25T11:54:00.000-05:00

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

Scientology

2006-04-20T15:22:00.000-05:00

"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

The Truth

2006-04-18T16:50:00.000-05:00

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

A Clear Midnight

2006-04-11T12:46:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-04-11T12:34:00.000-05:00

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

Cats

2006-04-09T15:36:00.000-05:00

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

faith/science

2006-04-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

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

The Case for Evolution

2006-04-04T10:12:00.000-05:00

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

There is no point

2006-03-27T18:18:00.000-06:00

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

2006-03-27T18:04:00.000-06:00

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.

How Long ?

2006-03-25T18:05:00.000-06:00

How long's a tear take take to dry ?

The Poetry Of The Corpse

2006-03-24T18:14:00.000-06:00

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.

To Do Today

2006-03-23T15:13:00.000-06:00

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

Anna Akhmatova