January 28 at 9AM is showing 19 degrees F outside and snow is coming. Starbucks is filled with the “Saturday crowd,” the atmosphere infused with the babble of voices. Life goes on — until it doesn’t. I read this in the New York Times summary of the news which is received by email daily:…
We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: ceaselessly we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and maternally, endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, joy, passion, torment, conscience, and fate. –Excerpt, The Gay Science, Preface §3, by Friedrich…
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…
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 —…
East Coker by T. S. Eliot III I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait…
From time to time we need to be separated from ourselves to gaze upon ourselves from above, and, from an artistic distance, to laugh and cry over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly or we cannot…
…there can be no doubtthat mankind is more changeable, uncertain, inconsistent than any other animal —he is the sick animal:how has this come about? Certainly he has also dared more,done more things, braved more and challenged fatemore than all the other animals put together;he, the great experimenter with himself,discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals,nature…
A philosophy that does not make us happier, more virtuous; that on the contrary, lets it be understood that one will likely perish in its service; that one will be isolated from one’s times, burned and scaled; that one will have to pass through every contempt and hate; that one will need a great…
What is great in humankind is that he is a bridge and not an end: What can be loved in man is that he/she is a passage and a fall. –Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue §4 I love he/she whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience:…
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall…
