zetetic

He is a free and secure citizen of the earth, for he is attached to a chain that is long enough to give him the freedom of all earthly realms, and yet not long enough for anything to pull him over the earth's boarders. At the same time, however, he is a free and secure citizen of heaven, for he is also attached to a similarly calculated heavenly chain. Thus if he wants to get down to earth, he is choked by the collar of heaven; if he wants to get up to heaven, by the collar of earth. And despite this he has every possibility and is aware of the fact; indeed he even refuses to attribute the whole thing to a mistake in the original chaining. Kafka.

Enjoying Kafka's something like admiring your new concrete boots. I found out recently that he was schizophrenic and also that he wanted all his work burned after his death. It's hard to decide against a person's wishes but what a loss to the world that would have been.

---

It was also very disappointing to read some of the the threads in the 'Seinfeld' Star in Ugly Racist Tirade' article. I posted my own opinions but I was genuinely shocked and angered by some of the ignorant, apathetic bullshit being bandied around by some members. Ho hum...people.

---0---

Some of my thoughts for the day:

The war between good and evil is a Sunday activity

Time is the fiction of movement; progress is the fiction of humanity

The only difference between Existentialism and puberty is a publishing deal

To have free will is simply to be able to fuck up; humans have free will in spades, no argument.

---x---


Can proximity cause vertigo?
It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin's son ran up to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.

Kundera.



------b--------

and last but not least, how fucking amazing is the following:

Take our solar system in school text books: a double page spread with a pretty big sun on one page and pluto looking pretty small over on the other. The reality is as follows:

"It isn't possible, in any practical terms to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away."

Bill Bryson. A Brief History Of Nearly Everything.

Much as humans do their utmost to destroy everything beautiful and sacred in this life, the very fact of this universe is incredible.

Hope anyone reading this is finding some happiness wherever they are...