A world without suffering is easy to imagine. Every human that has lived, members of our species, we language enabled mammals, finding ourselves thrown into this world, experience pain on many accounts. To avoid pain, to seek pleasure is and has been universal. A world without suffering has been a theme of countless legends,…
The statement is enough. It will be sufficient to linger for a while to consider what this means, how extensive the repression of imagination. Our imagination expands our world. The world is held conjointly, you and I in relation, even more, in company with all living and nonliving things. Who is to say that…
I am a fan of civilization. The comfort of this Starbucks, the soothing background music, the efficient and professional-polite barista, and this “just right” hot cup of delicious coffee, all appeal to me. Is this what is meant by civilized, polite society? I mean a society calibrated to ensure security and comfort for those…
Words published in 1881 persuades us that we ought to stop lying to ourselves. Nietzsche, the philologist compares the epoch of modern humanity, an era marked by reason, and the search for knowledge, by awareness of class differences, of institutional injustice, (a few of the hallmarks of a liberal-democratic society) – a juxtaposition with…
Attempting to wrap my mind around this insight – I inwardly shiver. To become well educated in the contemporary sense means a grasp of cause and effect, of a mechanical notion of reality, that events, even occasions of unspeakable enormity, of power so destructive that ordinary words cannot serve, – are no longer divine…
My quest for insight from Nietzsche continues. Today I began reading The Dawn of Day written in 1881. Beginning with The Dawn of Day Nietzsche’s ideas began to coalesce into a unified vision. As usual reading Nietzsche is like running full-out into the cold ocean surf. There is the shock of difference, the comfort…
Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68…
Rising from the evening’s rest I was in a surly frame of mind. I felt haunted by the spectre of college football. You know that fall season of televised spectacle where many millions of dollars are marshaled to fill magnificent stadiums with students, alumni arrayed in team apparel, some with painted faces, immersed in…
A Thursday morning, and I have an appointment with my lawnmower. Fallen leaves wait to be harvested. The mulch will not be wasted. The dying and the life-to-come are intimately linked, – mulch to new life. Just thinking about the infinite supply of shock material, so many videos from the political right and left…
This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he[she] lives surrounded by his[her] stories, and stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him…
