One of his [Heidegger’s] lectures on Aristotle begins thus: ‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died.’ Thinking is work. Later, Heidegger called thinking handwork: ‘Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet [Schrein]. At any rate, it is handwork. The hand makes thinking a decidedly analogue process. –excerpt, Non-things by Byung-chul Han, p….
Humans are intimate beings [Nahwesen]. Intimacy, however, is not the same as a lack of distance. Distance is a part of it. Nearness and distance belong together. The human being is thus simultaneously a being of nearness and a being of distance. That is why Kafka says that we can hold someone who is…
It’s called schadenfreude, a descriptive term for the satisfaction that wells up when someone else suffers misfortune. Confession: I felt schadenfreude while viewing the evening news’ depiction of the massive shoreline destruction, the result of the moon’s near orbit, of a high tide and the storm surge of hurricane Nicole’s wind lashed waves….
Not another song… Yes! I suspect that what I write is not a matter of choice at all. Is it chance, that implacable, impenetrable twisting of fate? I mean that branching of inchoate inclination to switch radio stations while on Fayban Parkway on the way to Starbucks. Whether chance or choice, I’ll never get…
The morning after the mid-terms. One has to expect something on the day after… What did I expect? Perhaps I thought that the deluge of propaganda, image-based demonizing of the opposition, “othering” of a member of the opposing party, caricaturing as anti-human one’s opponent would rule the day — the sun would fail to…
November 2nd, election day. But I voted early. Not that my voice will be heard. Is my voice hypothetically, durable enough to be heard, given the radical oppositional viewpoints, indeed the incipient violence roiling this land of “hopes and dreams?” Given what we Americans desire, the future we actively support, and the disparate languages…
Keeping Time by Mike Orlock I’ve lost time. Lost track of where I left it, (on a table at home, in a desk at work): I placed it somewhere for safekeeping, thinking, That five minutes will come in handy later today or early tomorrow— Just give me a minute, maybe two, I’ll get back…
In ourselves human existence is nothing but shouts, a cruel spasm, a giggling fit where agreement is born from a consciousness which is at last shared between the impenetrability of ourselves and that of others. — excerpt Literature and Evil, Genet, by Georges Bataille, p. 170 …all our yesterdays have lighted fools…
I am sure about one thing: humanity is not composed of isolated beings but of a communication between them. Never are we revealed, even to ourselves, other than in a network of communication with others. We bathe in communication, we are reduced to this incessant communication whose absence we feel, even in the depths…
We cannot assess the impact that our life will have upon others, others yet to be born. King Leonidas of the Spartans did not know, as he and his 300 men refused domination of the Persian God-king Xerxes, dying on the beach at Thermopylae, — the effect his life and story would have upon…
