I just started actually attempting this yesterday. I’m still pretty terrible but it’s a pretty easy concept, and much more fun than it ought to be.
When Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city, he accepted his death. He did say “well, if we are lucky perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers, and doubters too.” In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true, could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know it’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like “enough” yet. That I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I’d urge you to look at those of you who tell you, those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead until you believe as they do - what a terrible thing to be telling to children - and that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is; take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
- Christopher Hitchens
We are not allowed to exist in the world and so we become addicted to the abstracts that erase us. Because what is the alternative? What is the alternative?
I wrote in a poem once, “I fell,” and I’m sorry, it’s a little crude but I wrote in a poem once, “I fell out of the hole of my mother into the hole of my mother.” From the body to the dead spirit. How agonizing is it to look just not at your own history but at the thousands and thousands of years of human history and the billions of people around the world and to realize that everyone’s natural self is lacerated into atomic nonexistence. It’s agony. It’s agony. It’s liberating and it’s beautiful because truth is beautiful but it is agonizing. To let go of inconsequentiality, to let go of smallness. To let go of nonexistence. To be. To be. To live, to speak, to listen, to learn, to teach, to grow, to think, to be… is not allowed. And it is the fundamental provocation that turns the eyes of others into arrows.
- Stefan Molyneaux
“Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. This is where, I think, language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. It had to be easy when it was just simple survival. “Water.” We came up with a sound for that. “Sabretooth tiger behind you!” We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we’re experiencing. What is “frustration”? Or what is “anger” or “love”? When I say “love” the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this byzantine conduit in their brain through their memories of love or lack of love. And they register what I’m saying and they say yes they understand, but how do I know? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead. You know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another and we feel that we have connected and we think we’re understood I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling may be transient, but I think it’s what we live for.”
Kim Krizan, Waking Life
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
- Richard Dawkins
This is how my last 3 days went:
The sense of wonderment and determination as Mario quickly turns to monotony and frustration as Luigi and eventually all I see are purple coins spinning everywhere. Before I know it, I have 120 AGAIN, and get that final star’s ass all up in my hands.
I fucking won.
