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What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
15-Edge
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Category Archives: Existential
09-Mind
Synonyms
Thought: concept, cogitation, consideration, deliberation, estimation, idea, imagination, reflection, consideration, speculation, supposition.
Think: ponder; muse; cogitate, deliberate, esteem, imagine, reason, reflect, seriously consider; speculate, suppose.
22-Care
Emotion
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS
15-Such
Influence
A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.
Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.
Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.
Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis
18-Alim
Categorical Imperative
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Imagine first that the present is past, and second, that the past may yet be changed & amended.
Logotherapy by Victor Frankl
04-Vera
Context
When you look at an object, you see one side of it at a time; the nature of vision. When you think about something, you think about it in one context at a time; the nature of thought.
Context determines what your mind thinks just as viewing-angle determines what your eye sees.
14-Home
Creation
Besides being mostly void and bereft of matter, the universe at large is cruel and unfriendly. If the aliens are here, it’s for the conviviality of this one planet.
09-Hilo
Philosophical
Isak Borg Listens To Anders & Viktor
A: Ah, when creation shows so much beauty, how radiant must be the source!
V: How can anyone today study to become a minister!
A: Your rationalism is as dry as dust.
V: I say that modern man believes in only himself and his biological death.
A: Modern man is a figment of your imagination. Man regards death with horror.
V: Religion for the people. Opium for the aching limb.