Pensacola

There's this scene in the film Contact where we see a place that is somehow more real because it exists as a memory. It also reminds you how spectacularly beautiful the earth is (as does the picture above). If I was a Buddhist in a previously life that might explain why I'm so drawn to that photograph. What is beautiful always reminds of you something else that is beautiful, perhaps from some former time, by some former self. Muslims would say, I think, that we live in the shadow of the Garden. 

The second picture is a stark warning of the shape of things to come. What happens in Greenland, some say, is a litmus test for the impact of greenhouse gasses on all our lives. 

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Pope Francis: "In the prevailing culture, priority is given to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional."

Keynes, on the money as usual:

" Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are largely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexity and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols."  

Perfect rationality, perfect foresight and, therefore, perfect control. Except that's not how things work. Since we live (and die) in time there is no position we can take that is completely outside it. There is no thinking from the point of view of the universe, or a view from nowhere.

The impulse to transcend time is, perhaps, always with us but it leads to delusion if it isn't tempered by the mundane realities of daily existence. If we want to 'intuit unity' then we always resist doing so as well. Everything, you think, lies in the hyphen that at once connects and separates: I-We. A bit like &.

Perhaps the very essence of what is beautiful is drawn from this tension between the ephemeral and the permanent, as if one couldn't exist without the other?

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