November 2011
88 posts
October 2011
45 posts
"Positive thinking"
A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord, let me suffer much
and then die
Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear
Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before
Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it
so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love
Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain
And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee’s headAnna Kamieńska
“I was speaking before of Heidegger and I said that mortality according to Heidegger is what makes my time mine, such that it cannot be shared with another—nobody can die in my place—and such that it is totally indeterminate. This will lead Heidegger to say that time must be thought from the perspective of the future. My death always remains “still come,” and hence a magnificent paradox—my event is the sole event I will never live. When my death arrives, I won’t be there to live it. Death will therefore never happen to me. It’s both what will never happen to me, and the only thing which can really happen to me. Because, say you catch a flu, or you fall in love with the man or woman you love, then they leave…all this happens. Nothing is ever quite irremediable, so nothing ever happens conclusively, inasmuch as the only things that are conclusive are the irremediable things. Except death. It’s only death which conclusively happens to you. The problem is that it won’t really happen either. So it’s nothing but a phantom. It has never been, and it will never arrive. There are nothing but phantasms.”
-Bernard Stiegler
This is basically a long-winded way of saying what John Shade/Vladimir Nabokov wrote as a simple syllogism: “other men die. I am not another, therefore I’ll not die.”
It’s one of my favorite paradoxes. Death is both the most real and the least real thing that will (n)ever happen to you.
“A Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest. In a newly uncertain world, he offered science, conviction, stories that could organise chaos. He turned brutal crimes — the vestiges of the beast in man — into intellectual puzzles. But after the investigation at Road Hill the image of the detective darkened. Many felt that Whicher’s inquiries culminated in a violation of the middle-class home, an assault on privacy, a crime to match the murder he had been sent to solve.”
—The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale (via novazembla)
Out of curiosity I’ve watched the first couple Amy episodes of Doctor Who and it is tripping. me. out.
We have the same eye color, hair style, and even fucking dimples.
So, I just had this weird epiphany…it somehow completely escaped my notice until this evening that I look exactly like that Doctor Who woman. How it completely escaped me I have no idea. I see her on my dash daily.
