Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
I have no time for idle conversation with casual acquaintances. To speak of light subjects with people close to me (i.e., people I already know to be earnest and thoughtful, and thus whose incidental thoughts are of some intrinsic interest to me) has a value analogous to a bit of butter on fresh bread — inessential, but nonetheless pleasant. But to speak in...
From the entry on “Bird” in Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols: Every winged being is symbolic of spiritualization. The bird, according to Jung, is a beneficent animal representing spirits or angels, supernatural aid, thoughts and flights of fancy. Hindu tradition has it that birds represent the higher states of being. To quote a passage from the Upanishads: ‘Two birds, inseparable companions, inhabit the...
Last evening, I ate dinner with a student at a department store food court. At one point in the conversation, while talking about the kind of attitudes and responses that pass for “normal” today, I suddenly had an odd thought. Looking around the large, moderately crowded but “socially-distanced” court, I mused aloud, “If someone from the government walked in here right now and...
I have friends I have never met face to face whom I would trust with all my money. Meanwhile, very few of the “friends” I have made through the normal social accidents of my life have ever been more than useful or pleasant acquaintances in the end — “nice,” agreeable enough, but lacking the essential kinship of soul that is the essence of...
Regular readers will be aware that I often return, perhaps somewhat obsessively, to the theme of not wasting time. I can never emphasize enough, however, that when I speak of wasting time, or invoke the personal motto of sorts that I use to exhort my serious students to improve their lives — “I don’t waste time” — I am not even remotely concerned...
After nine long months of recovering from two foot surgeries, this walking fanatic is finally returning to his proper routine, including a short early morning walk, alone, during which I clear my mind of irrelevancies, organize my thoughts, and generally enjoy observing the world around me on its own terms, which is to say entirely without practical concerns, without the emotional mire of...
Time is a faculty of the mind for ordering and measuring our spatio-temporal experience in terms of sequence. When our scientists, our appointed cataloguers of the mind’s measuring systems, decree (for the moment) that the universe is 13.8 billion years old — give or take a few hundred million, of course — they are defining the limits of the mind’s own measuring tool,...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 19, 2019 · Last modified October 28, 2019
If awareness is our essence, then human life, as experienced, is everything you did not miss. Of course, our mind’s gaze, like our eye’s, will necessarily miss most things — almost all things, proportionally. It follows that the fullest life possible to us is not the one which chases the greatest quantity of sights — a fool’s errand, given the natural limits of...
On November 8th, the United States of America is staging (I choose that word carefully) a presidential election that will go down (and I also choose that word carefully) in history as the most terrifying, banal, hideous, and irrational exercise in the entire spotty narrative of Western democracy. The nation on whose fate largely rests that of the whole Earth at this moment–the nation with the most money,...
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