Category Archives: Existential

12-Murk

6 Replies

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

10-Turn

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Changing Weather

Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works. Enjoy life with the wife you love, all the days of the vain life granted you under the sun. This is your lot in life for the toil of your labors under the sun.

Anything you can turn your hand to, do with what power you have; for there will be no work, no planning, no knowledge, no wisdom in Sheol where you are going.

Ecclesiastes 9:7-10

12-Dirt

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Archaeology

You and I have memories
Longer than the road
That stretches out ahead”

Two of Us by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970)

385 million years from now the world will be vastly different again as well, while the universe, during the same time period, will have changed insignificantly (in comparison to its totality, of course).

The point is: you don’t have to move all that far from where you are now to experience expanded consciousness. Merely step outside. Go to the beach if possible.

26-Trak

2 Replies

Framework

Willow Glen Plaza
Odd August (6-day week!) <- click to get current month

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire–why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express & admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals–and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet by William Shakespeare