A certain non-knowledge must leave me disarmed before what I have to do… so that I have to do it in order for me to feel freely obligated and bound to it… It is necessary to know the most and the best possible, but between the widest, the most refined, the most necessary knowledge,…
Friday morning, the air clean, brisk, — is illumined by our sun. Humanity is warmed by the same sun, as our home world rotates. Every word in the two sentences just written is relative, a marker for a set of relationships. Nevertheless all of it feels absolutely true. Do you not feel that humanity…
Man is a fly behind a window and the time that he passes in beating against the window is the most human, being the most rebellious. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes, page 287 by Georges Bataille Sadness, tinged with some grief this morning. Loss is more or less, greater and lesser, equivalent to life. I…
Midweek, the sun shines, the usual frigid winter cold has moderated. A good day for a long walk, and lunch with a friend. What to write about as several things present themselves to mind today. First is the wonder of learning, no matter our circumstances, there are elements at hand to admire, recognize as…
A gray Tuesday, winter… Surely this must be the mid-west. Indeed, the Fox River Valley is west of Chicago. A typical winter’s pall has ascended, and homo sapiens are inclined toward hibernation. Never mind Chinese spy balloons, or an earthquake in Turkey, or a war grinding on between Russia and Ukraine, or commerce that…
Life— that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame —also everything that wounds us; we simply cannot do otherwise. –excerpt The Gay Science, Preface, §3 by Friedrich Nietzsche Last night I watched the Grammy Awards on CBS. I was indifferent to most of the two hour show. It…
Memory. How crucial, even sublime is the faculty of memory. In the pre-dawn I dreamed. I was back at my childhood home. Perhaps it was only a fragment, a sliver of sensation. I saw, or better expressed, felt that I was in the hallway of the old house where I grew up, living…
One kind of man will risk nothing, another wants risks. Are we others contemptuous of life? On the contrary, we instinctively seek life raised to a higher power, life lived in danger— but that, to repeat it, does not mean we want to be more virtuous than others. Pascal, for example, wanted to risk…
We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we…
You want if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that seems to us an end, a state that makes humanity ridiculous and contemptible —…
