REPOST: Compilation of the Heart - 'Time Slice'

❝How did it get so late so soon?

Its night before its afternoon.

December is here before its June.

My goodness how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon? ❞

Dr. Seuss

Archive

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Compilation of the Heart - Floating and Drowning

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Nightswimming

be still my beating heart

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It's only a Paper Moon

Nobody would take the time and effort
to hang a fake moon in the real sky.

Haruki Murakami

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Compilation of the Heart - Demut

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Alley Cat

You are not responsible.

but then – 
Maybe you are

Open the box

and you'll find

The cat
in the box

Is dead.

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Harmatia - One must be Werther or nothing.

There are those who are made for living and those who are made for loving.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle. Such a love culminates only in the ultimate contradiction of death.

One must be Werther or nothing.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (The Absurd Man)

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I do not want to get out of my depth.

This aspect of life being given to me, can I adapt myself to it?

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Absurd Reasoning)

I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support. And what constitutes the basis of that conflict, of that break between the world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If therefore I want to preserve it, I can through a constant awareness, ever revived, ever alert. This is what, for the moment, I must remember. At this moment the absurd, so obvious and yet so hard to win, returns to a man's life and finds its home there. At this moment, too, the mind can leave the arid, dried-up path of lucid effort. That path now emerges in daily life.

It encounters the world of the anonymous impersonal pronoun "one," but henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity. He has forgotten how to cope. […]

All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to the abject and magnificent shelter of man's heart. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. Is one going to die, escape by the leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas and forms to one's own scale? Is one, on the contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd? Let's make a final effort in this regard and draw all our conclusions. The body, affection, creation, action, human nobility will then resume their places in this mad world. […]

This is what allows him [man] everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.

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Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness. Negating one of the terms of the opposition on which he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. […]

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. […]

It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience is remote from suicide. It may be thought that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. […]

Knowing whether or not man is free doesn't interest me. I can experience only my own freedom. As to it, I can have no general notions, but merely a few clear insights. The problem of "freedom as such" has no meaning. […]

But at the same time the absurd man realizes that hitherto he was bound to that postulate of freedom on the illusion of which he was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his liberty. […]

The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation. […]

But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. […]

Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me. 

I do not want to get out of my depth. This aspect of life being given me, can I adapt myself to it?

♥   Now I know why I had to buy that book. It's soo helpful if there's somebody telling you why your crisis is even profounder than you think.

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Confrontation

OK. The problem didn't go away by itself. Too bad.

This will drive me crazy, simply, because I cannot understand how that happened.

The other day I was editing a post, because I was thinking of a certain Rilke poem and wanted to have a look at it. Going through it I figured I needed the whole thing and not just the extract I picked out back then. So I changed it. 

And I have this thing that I always need to remember everything that's happened or I've seen (even if it's dead and ugly). Thus, I document, annotate, save and back-up save everything in multiple folders, pdf files and whatever else. And I was thinking to myself, Why are even you doing this? It on my blog. It's pointless.

Answer came within the next 12 hours. Great. I can never trust the internet again.

Using my pdf's at least I can quickly find back the pic belonging to each post.

Maybe I find something I forgot. It's quite helpful sometimes to recall things I kind of worked out for myself before and I usually find some comfort in it.

Right now I find comfort in here:

"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life  while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins." - Franz Kafka

I'm going to fix the Kafka posts first. And for the rest - if you're looking for me, 

I'll be under the ruins.

This is not necessarily good.

_
✓

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I think it broke!

My blog broke itself! Or I finally broke the both of us. Sometimes hard to tell.

MY EMOTIONAL CARRIER SYSTEM BROKE!

Well. A certain liability to instability is indestructible. I can always rely on that and let it devour me, while I hope the problem goes away.
Which usually it doesn't.

Still. PLEEEASE GO AWAY!

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Compilation of the Heart - Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

You see the trunk and don't realize the tree has been cut down.

But hey, if you don't know where you are, at least you know how fast you're going.

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Evidence for the Absence of God

Hermann Hesse - Das Glasperlenspiel

Dienst

Im Anfang herrschten jene frommen Fürsten,

Feld, Korn und Pflug zu weihen und das Recht

Der Opfer und der Maße im Geschlecht

Der Sterblichen zu üben, welche dürsten

Nach der Unsichtbaren gerechtem Walten,

Das Sonn' und Mond im Gleichgewichte hält,

Und deren ewig strahlende Gestalten

Des Leids nicht kennen und des Todes Welt.

Längst ist der Göttersöhne heilige Reihe

Erloschen, und die Menschheit blieb allein,

In Lust und Leides Taumel, fern vom Sein,

Ein ewiges Werden ohne Maß und Weihe.

Doch niemals starb des wahren Lebens Ahnung,

Und unser ist das Amt, im Niedergang

Durch Zeichenspiel, durch Gleichnis und Gesang

Fortzubewahren heiliger Ehrfurcht Mahnung.

Vielleicht, daß einst das Dunkel sich verliert,

Vielleicht, daß einmal sich die Zeiten wenden,

Daß Sonne wieder uns als Gott regiert

Und Opfergaben nimmt von unsern Händen.

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Worship

In the beginning was the rule of sacred kings

Who hallowed field, grain, plow, who handed down

The law of sacrifices, set the bounds

To mortal men forever hungering

For the Invisible Ones' just ordinance

That holds the sun and moon in perfect balance

And whose forms in their eternal radiance

Feel no suffering, nor know death's ambience.

Long ago the sons of the gods, the sacred line,

Passed, and mankind remained alone,

Embroiled in pleasure and pain, cut off from being,

Condemned to change unhallowed, unconfined.

But intimations of the true life never died,

And it is for us, in this time of harm,

To keep, in metaphor and symbol and in psalm,

Reminders of that sacred reverence.

Perhaps some day the darkness will be banned,

Perhaps some day the times will turn about,

The sun will once more rule us as our god,

And take the sacrifices from our hand.

Hermann Hesse – The Glass Bead Game

Translation

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The Dividing Line

Parallel Mirrors

    

The world, as we see it,

is a mirror of the mind,

at which the mind glares, trying

to look back at itself,

but always falling, lost

in its Narcissus stare.

The mind, as it is,

is a mirror of the world,

and when the world moves

a strong godlike right arm,

a bantam left hand points down

at the dark back of the mind.

I stare at you often,

as if you were my world,

wanting you to stare back at me

with a deliberation

and a mischievous intensity

that undresses all will and thoughts.

Will I dare return it?

Or was I the one who started?

If I am a reflex

let me be aware of it,

so that your gaze on my face

finds a mirror with a purpose.

Armando Halpern

  

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Shipwreck

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I'm fine.

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Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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