Light Years

Faith, like a bird, sees its 'trackless way' unattended by the intellect.
--The Allama.

Today, the quality of light reminds me of Milosz, of what is bound and what is free, of weight and lightness.

How should I live?
How do I bloody know!

Is the unexamined life worth living?
Dunno, let me think about it.

One sometimes hears in my 'line of work' the assertion-and it is said with some pride: "I'm a theorist". A fancy way of dressing up a very limited approach to reality. I always feel like asking: Of what? What actually does such a convoluted approach achieve, what does it aim to achieve? University people are 'infected'-if that's not too strong a word- by this desire to appear clever and sophisticated in such matters, to confound people with difficult words and useless jargon, blissfully unaware of the lives of real people, the lives of others.

Of course, this is not an argument (why does everything have to be an argument?) against abstraction, discipline, technique, clarity and so on. Just asking: what is the "life" in the 'life of the mind'? Is there a point in time where one has to ask oneself: what am I actually saying, what do I actually know, what is the shape of my ignorance, how is my thought related to my life? Why do you want principles, regularities, homogeneity...why this aversion to wonder, particularities, the unknown?

Right-seeing: the ability to see others in the right light depends, doesn't it, on the ability and desire to see ourselves in the right way?

The end of philosophy: to see the end of philosophy. All truth is on the boundaries.

"The eye of a nihilist" - Nietzsche wrote in 1887 - "is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, to lose their leaves".

Everything had left her-the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something. They pass, dissolve, are scattered like dust..The days had lost their warmth. Sometimes at noon , as if in farewell, there was an hour or two like summer, swiftly gone. ..In the distant fields, seas of dank earth far from towns, there were still tomatoes clinging to the vines. At first glance it seemed only a few, but they were hidden, sheltered; that was how they had survived.
---Light Years.