| KHftCEA 2000-05.3 May |
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KHftCEA 2000-05.3 May
For a year I've lived right off a street called Henderson, and it never quite looks familiar when I'm walking towards cottage avenue. S'funny that; I wonder what my mental image of it is, then. 00-5-27 --- A metaphor for the practice of thinking of mortality: it's a bit like fire fighting in the wilderness. Random thoughts- fleeting references to the passing of time, realizng the finiteness of things- are sparks that can set a fire to cause many sleepless nights. To prevent that, you can just work to make sure those sparks don't show up, but a better bet is to try to saturate the land with comforting perspectives, and keep coming back to those perspectives whenever conditions seem to warrant it. 00-5-27 --- And the latest odd spark- everyone I know from freshman year of college- Mo, Rebekah, Anna, Rob-- I've known since I was 18! Amazingly young. But it's been a long tme, right? (It would have to be- that's maybe a tenth of my whole life-- yikes, that tenth scares me.) Also, there was a line I should've written down from a book- either Miss Wyoming or Day Job- about how you stop making new friends around the same time you buy your first piece of expensive furniture. 00-5-27 --- If...you acquire a living knowledge of the history of great men, you will learn from it a surpreme comandment: to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbrining of the present age which sees its advantage in preventing your growth so as to rule and exploit you to the full while you are still immature. --Nietzsche Interesting to compare this observation with the worship of youth we have today, and youthful lack of responsibility and seeking of pleasure. 00-5-28 --- When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mythical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. --Whitman Gah! It's crap like this that reminds me how much I hated reading the transcendentalists in high school... he looked up in mute incomprehension, willing to have the ease of labeling it as a big silent black box rather than working to see what really is. As if I scientist loses the ability to look up at the perfect silence! Like Feynman says, but he can enjoy the flowers on many more levels than the only-poet. 00-5-28 --- Odd biological thought, not for polite company: our anuses are really lame sculptors, though the raw material provided by our intestines makes a big difference. 00-5-28 --- "I gave women multiple orgasms so I can hear them scream MY name!!" --God, quoted by xeno6696@earthlink.net --- As a nation, the United States is a fiction that stands on three legs: a set of still contested eighteenth-century political documents; the cautionary example of the Civil War; and the daily consumption of mass culture. That's it. Everything else, however tremendous, is secondary. Tripods are precarious, as I'm reminded whenever I encounter intimidatingly foursquare foriegners--all these knitted residues of race, land, religion, and language. The rest of the world deems Americans superficial, and that is correct. What the rest of the world may not grasp is that we are profoundly superficial. --Peter Schjeldahl --- Tibor Kalman: a very interesting designer, with an interest in "the amateur spirit" and "fucking things up"-- reading some biographical pieces from about a year ago. (And what a bummer that I'm not doing enough with my life to warrant similar attention- ah well!) 00-5-28 |