You don't give much thought -probably because you haven't got much to give in the first place-to how to live. Except the thought of first place does guide you, now and then. Don't want to see the world; silliness like the Taj Mahal doesn't interest you. Stay, stay inside.
Yesterday Irfan asked if didn't want to know the answer. Er..what was the question again? But no, I don't know what the answer is or what it even might look like. I suspect it would like something like the tree outside my house, suspect it would sound like the silence of the back room, the radio dial stuck, as it always is, on a particular frequency. Strain to find the answer. Waste so much time training your mind on it. None of that seems to matter. Little r said she wants to get married. "To who?" I asked. She smiled and said: Paddington Bear. Of course, but who else!
So many dream of being something, someone, or of finding our "true self". If this was California and the 1960's and I a Buddhist, then maybe. But this is here and now, the accumulation of all the here and nows of before (and maybe some of the future ones as well-God knows).
'One lives with light and pleasure in spaces hitherto lost and really quite dark'
---Mercier, in Braudel's Wheel.
A line from K. Irby...the sunshine on the sidewalk is all we had. Near Ray Lodge, you always walk on the side where the shade is deepest, out of the light. Catch your breath, hold your thought. Your skin and mind's northern aversion to too much light. Some other kind of clarity, surely? Icarus: the world turned away.
The gaze, perhaps through no effort of its own, turned inwards. Through the smoke you see a face. Memory and desire meet.
Only a dead person or a philosopher asks: how to live?
Yesterday Irfan asked if didn't want to know the answer. Er..what was the question again? But no, I don't know what the answer is or what it even might look like. I suspect it would like something like the tree outside my house, suspect it would sound like the silence of the back room, the radio dial stuck, as it always is, on a particular frequency. Strain to find the answer. Waste so much time training your mind on it. None of that seems to matter. Little r said she wants to get married. "To who?" I asked. She smiled and said: Paddington Bear. Of course, but who else!
So many dream of being something, someone, or of finding our "true self". If this was California and the 1960's and I a Buddhist, then maybe. But this is here and now, the accumulation of all the here and nows of before (and maybe some of the future ones as well-God knows).
'One lives with light and pleasure in spaces hitherto lost and really quite dark'
---Mercier, in Braudel's Wheel.
A line from K. Irby...the sunshine on the sidewalk is all we had. Near Ray Lodge, you always walk on the side where the shade is deepest, out of the light. Catch your breath, hold your thought. Your skin and mind's northern aversion to too much light. Some other kind of clarity, surely? Icarus: the world turned away.
The gaze, perhaps through no effort of its own, turned inwards. Through the smoke you see a face. Memory and desire meet.
Only a dead person or a philosopher asks: how to live?
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