A human lifetime is 80 years long on average. A person imagines and organizes his life with that span in mind. What I have just said everyone knows, but only rarely do we realize that the number of years granted us is not merely a quantitative fact, an external feature (like nose length or eye color), but is part of the very definition of the human. A person, who might live, with all his faculties, twice as long, say 160 years, would not belong to our species. Nothing about this life would be like ours- not love, or ambitions, or feelings, or nostalgia; nothing. If after 20 years abroad an migr were to come back to his native land with another hundred years of life ahead of him, he would have little sense of a Great Return. For him it would probably not be a return at all, just one of many byways in the long journey of his life.
The notion of love (of great love, of one-and-only love) itself also derives, probably, from the narrow bounds of the time we are granted... We who must die so soon, we just don't know.
Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life... If some one could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up and fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings; neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper... but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it, a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside of will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.
...I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past, they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections. Each of them retains two or three small scenes form the past, but each has his own. Their recollections are not similar, they don't intersect, and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable. One person remembers the other more than he is remembered: first because memory capacity varies among individuals (and explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other.
-a bit of Ignorance by Milan Kundera, a short novel about these themes and distrust among Czech people after the fall of the Soviet empire. We, as Americans, probably all figured there'd be nothing but great happy homecomings for people who defected, but Milan looks at resentments among blood- and marital-family members at the migrs for, among other things, causing additional Soviet agent surveillance in their families by defecting, or enjoying life in Paris more than the homeland.
A quick, intelligent read, interesting insights on human psychology, and I always say if you want a good, well-written, thoughtful, and depressing read, you can't go wrong with Kundera or Margaret Atwood.
The notion of love (of great love, of one-and-only love) itself also derives, probably, from the narrow bounds of the time we are granted... We who must die so soon, we just don't know.
Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life... If some one could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up and fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings; neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper... but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it, a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside of will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.
...I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past, they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections. Each of them retains two or three small scenes form the past, but each has his own. Their recollections are not similar, they don't intersect, and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable. One person remembers the other more than he is remembered: first because memory capacity varies among individuals (and explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other.
-a bit of Ignorance by Milan Kundera, a short novel about these themes and distrust among Czech people after the fall of the Soviet empire. We, as Americans, probably all figured there'd be nothing but great happy homecomings for people who defected, but Milan looks at resentments among blood- and marital-family members at the migrs for, among other things, causing additional Soviet agent surveillance in their families by defecting, or enjoying life in Paris more than the homeland.
A quick, intelligent read, interesting insights on human psychology, and I always say if you want a good, well-written, thoughtful, and depressing read, you can't go wrong with Kundera or Margaret Atwood.
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Check the geezer's group, i'm sure someone is older than you
The middle star is colored in with sky. When I orginally got the tattoo I only had the outline done because I wanted that tattoo but I didn't know what I wanted it filled in with. I wanted to have the outline and some time to think about it.
So I figured it out. I love sky. Blue sky and clouds... It's what I take the most pictures of.
For the longest time I used to get questioned about what I was going to do with the rest of them. If I was going to fill in all my other little outlines... I love them the way they are, but who knows, maybe one day I'll decide it needs some dressing up.
I have a bunch of stars on my tree. I have star garland woven from grapevine. I also have ornaments with stars.
I bought these really cool large tree balls that have stars, planets and space ships on them. As far as a star on top of my tree, I have yet to buy one. They have one for sale that I found that is an illumination ornament or whatever. It was $50 bucks! I don't have that kind of short notice room in my budget, so maybe I'll pick it up on ebay some time before next cmas.
This year I have a butterfly as my tree topper. It's red with some glittery spots. I love it. I pinned her on with green floral wire so it looks like it's flying away.
I hope you have a happy holiday too. I'm pumped because I have Cmas to look forward too and then I have monday off which rules... and then only a week until I take my first plane ride out to Arizona to see my friend for a week.
PUMPED!