molloy

and truly it little matters what i say, this or that or any other thing. saying is inventing. wrong, very rightly wrong. you invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept

the heart is a lonely hunter

... and when at last he was inside again he composed himself soberly to await the morning sun

i, rome

if you're interesting in learning ancient roman history in a fun way, check out the HBO series Rome (torrent), and Robert Grave's famous novel I, Claudius. together, they give a great overview of the roman empire from Julius Caesar to Nero

i had thought both would be 'heavy', but they are really just so wonderfully entertaining

all i need

accompanied and guided by these voices in his soul, with feelings like those of a soldier home from the wars, he wandered about this pleasant landscape, for the first time in many terrible months not a stranger, a fugitive, a candidate for death, but with an open heart, thinking of nothing, desiring nothing, surrendering utterly to the tranquil present, grateful and somewhat astonished at himself and at this new, unwonted, rapturous state of mind, this undemanding receptivity, this serenity without tensions, this new mode of taking delight in close observation.

subdued fires

what you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualitities towards an isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the centre, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervour cannot always be seen. in argument, for example, they will not shout and wave their arms. but i assure you, they are nevertheless burning with subdued fires.
~ Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

the banded ones were all dressed in white gowns –- a gay survival from the Old Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms –- days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average.

grammatical fiction

Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the ‘first person singular’, and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found out that those processes wrongly known as ‘monologues’ are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as ‘I’ instead of ‘you’, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observations and even refuses to be localized in time and space.
Now, however, it seemed to Rubashov that the habitually silent partner spoke sometimes, without being addressed and without any visible pretext; his voice sounded totally unfamiliar to Rubashov, who listened in honest wonder and found that his own lips were moving. These experiences held nothing mystic or mysterious; they were of a quite concrete character; and by his observations Rubashov gradually became convinced that there was a thoroughly tangible component in this first person singular, which had remained silent through all these years and now had started to speak.
...
Rubashov tried to study this newly discovered entity very thoroughly during his wanderings through the cell; with the shyness of emphasizing the first person singular customary to the Party, he had christened it the ‘grammatical fiction.’ He probably had only a few weeks left to live, and he felt a compelling urge to clear up this matter, to ‘think it to a logical conclusion.’ But the realm of the ‘grammatical fiction’ seemed to begin just where the ‘thinking to a conclusion’ ended. It was obviously an essential part of its being, to remain out of the reach of logical thought, and then to take one unawares, as from an ambush, and attack one with day-dreams and toothache.

and at this point i felt the truth burning within me like a sharp flame, that there was some role for everybody but it was not one which he himself could choose, re-cast and regulate to his own liking. one had no right to want new gods, no right at all to want to give the world anything of that sort! there was but one duty for a grown man; it was to seek the way to himself, to become resolute within, to grope his way forward wherever that might lead him. the discovery shook me profoundly; it was the fruit of this experience. i had often toyed with pictures of the future, dreamed of roles which might be assigned to me - as a poet, maybe, or prophet or painter or kindred vocation. all that was futile. i was not there to write poetry, to preach or paint; neither i nor any other man was there for that purpose. they were only incidental things. there was only one true vocation for everybody - to find the way to himself. he might end as poet, lunatic, prophet or criminal - that was not his affair; ultimately it was of no account. his affair was to discover his own destiny, not something of his own choosing, and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. anything else was merely a half life, an attempt at evasion, an escape into the ideals of the masses, complacency and fear of his inner soul. the new picture rose before me, sacred and awe-inspiring, a hundred times glimpsed, possibly often expressed and now experienced for the first time. i was an experiment on the part of nature, a 'throw' into the unknown, perhaps for some new purpose, perhaps for nothing and my only vocation was to allow this 'throw' to work itself out in my innermost being, feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. that or nothing!

my next read

Critical Mass: how one thing leads to another
by Philip Ball

Publisher description:

Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society.

Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs.

Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Library subject headings for this publication: Sociology, Human behavior Philosophy, Physics Social aspects

please, no pathos, my friend! anyway, did you observe the ritardando? an inspiration, eh? yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of this ritardando touch you. do you hear the basses? they stride like gods. and let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it peace. just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. pay attention and you will learn something. observe how this crazy funnel apparently does the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing in the world. it takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction, stupid and coarse, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanishm, its inane meddling and marring. listen, then, you poor thing. listen well. you have need of it. and now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of life. when you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. it makes its unappetizing tone-slime of the most magic orchestral music. everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between the orchestra and ear. all life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. it little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. better learn to listen first! learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

proud?

i am the number one Google result if you search for the words:

run your course my feverish child

i'm not sure how i feel about this ...

more stolen words ...

... so it is with every one. just as i dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. and they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as i do, who have left the track.
~ Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

ich bein der steppenwolf

reflecting thus, i walked on and on. yes, even without the chamber music and the friend. how foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! solitude is independence. it had been my wish and with the years i had attained it. it was cold. oh, cold enough! but it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
~hermann hesse

topic ... topic ...

i haven't posted anything in far too long ... i could give you an update on my life, but i never wanted this to be a diary / livejournal sort of thing ... more of an ep(sa)ersonazine, you might say ...
then again, you might be crazy! ;)

so, a PSA: if you're looking for a fun read, and liked Lord of the Rings and/or Harry Potter, check out the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman ... i just finished book two and it's addictive!
(thank you to Michelle and Jon for that recommendation)

relativity ...

Some people say that their school days were the happiest of their lives. They may be right, but I always look with suspicion upon those whom I hear saying this. It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one's life ...
~ Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Walden-inspired ...

hereis some of the logic behind my retirement plan:

"the cost of a thing is the amount of [life] which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." ~Thoreau

after a four-year degree in finance and economics, it is this concept which best encapsulates my thinking on personal financial planning ... i look at a material possession and instead of seeing a price tag of $1000, i see a price tag of "one more month at my stupid job".

what i would like to do in my life is to accentuate this simple formula of cost = time. i would like to look at all material desires and think to myself "is it worth giving up my afternoon for that?" the problem with doing this currently is that i need to make money to cover my fixed costs: food, shelter, and other basic needs. thus, i have no choice but to work a full-time job ... and if i'm going to have a full-time job, why not stick with the prosperous one which i currently have ... and if i'm currently prosperous, why not spend some of that money on material desires ... and the slave-to-the-wage cycle continues ...

so instead, what i have done (almost) is i've saved up enough money to cover my basic fixed costs for the rest of my life. with my fixed costs out of the way, every use of my time becomes a matter of choice. i want a car? is it worth working this winter for one? yes? okay, decision made. i want to eat out more, is it worth it? nah, i can make great food at home for much cheaper, and hey, i like cooking and have plenty of time to do it ... heck, i might even use my time to plant a garden in the backyard and grow my own veggies!

capese? :)

Ian McEwan

i just finished reading Ian McEwan's wonderful new novel Saturday, and wanted to reiterate my love of his work. His previous novel, Atonement, is one of my favourites of all time, and i also greatly enjoyed Amsterdam and Enduring Love. if you are a reader, you have my guarantee that you will find some value in picking up any of these.

Ayn Rand, in short

i just finished reading Ayn Rand's early novel Anthem. it was quite enjoyable, nice and short (a hundred pages, compared to her main writings Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead which are closer to a thousand pages) and was a very good introduction to her philosophy of obectivism. while Anthem's themes are similar to those of 1984, it's important to note that Anthem was written over a decade before this masterpiece ... quite impressive, in my opinion.

online literature

you may have noticed that i do much of my reading online (when i'm bored at work, in fact.) if you're interested in reading online (at work?) i suggest two sites:

byGosh.com has a good list of the 'best' free online novels of the 20th Century

and

The Online Books Page at U-Penn has a comprehensive list of all free online novels, searchable by author

proustagain

... for one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.
~Swann's Way