Enjoying the view from Limbo
When the alternative to being what they hate is being what you hate, you must ask yourself which of those alternatives you would prefer to avoid. All and Some.– If you want any of your life, you must accept all of it. Coming to terms with that fact and its deepest implications is perhaps the greatest challenge of the serious life, and its...
Recently, a serious student mired in stressful study for a professional certification exam expressed anxiety about her current situation and concern about her work ethic, wondering how her study progress, judged by Time, would look any better than the movement of a sloth. This description got me thinking about our common use of the sloth as a standard metaphor for inefficient or unproductive...
Arrive faster, and fatter. Work longer to pay for the luxury of getting to work more efficiently. Race unaffected past a year’s worth of interesting potential observations each day. Do a hundred transient and inconsequential things in the time it would have taken you to do just one meaningful thing in the old days. Accomplish thousands of tasks without having to go through...
Life in the fullest sense is not a race. It is a search. A race is fast, and by definition everyone in a race has agreed to run in the same direction. A search, by contrast, is slow, and the best searchers are the ones who have the courage to depart from the standard path sometimes and walk into the woods alone. One...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 30, 2021
“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.” “But I like the inconveniences.” “We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.” “But I...
To be eternal is not to live through an endlessly long time, but to live through no time. It is not like writing every book in the world, or counting every number to infinity, but rather like writing a single word that implies all books, or thinking “one” not as the beginning of a series but as all numbers simultaneously. To be eternal...
Fast talk usually means weak thought. Speed, as a rule, is superficiality’s colorful mask. In rhetoric, whether political, legal, or academic, the fast talker hopes to mesmerize your senses with how many words he can spew forth without a pause, in lieu of engaging your reason with the profundity of his ideas. The incessant and rapid flow disrupts sober attention and evades hard...
We live in the age of speed. From our technology to our politics, getting things done quickly, without “dragging one’s feet,” has become the definitive virtue of modern existence; and I say “existence,” rather than life, since speed and life have very little to do with one another. This age we call “modernity” will likely be remembered, by the inhabitants of some future...
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