A small glittering thing

While I'm on a quote-kick, might as well toss out another existential fav:

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we pluck some small glittering thing, and we cling to it, and tell ourselves that it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

- Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief

Endless becoming

I can't recall what book I jotted this from, but I found it in some notes I was throwing out:

Later in his philosophical development the idea of freedom became Sarte's main theme. Man, beginning in the loathsome emptiness of his existence, creates his essence -- his self, his being -- through his choices that he freely makes. Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy. "Existentialists," wrote Irish philosopher Arland Ussher, "have a notable
difficulty in finishing their books: of necessity, for their philosophy --
staying close to the movement of life -- can have no finality."

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Related to a project I'm working on:

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

—T. H. Huxley

Or, in other words, problem solving through serendipity. It doesn't sound very reliable, but it has always worked for me.

(knock on wood)

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world

A philosophy for life, via A Love Song For Bobby Long:

*****

Some people reach a place in time where they've gone as far as they can. A place where wives and jobs collide with desire. That which is unknowable and those who remain out of sight. See what it is invisible and you will see what to write. That's how Bobby used to put it. It was the invisible people he wanted to live with. The ones that we walk past everday, the ones we sometimes become. The ones in books who live only in someones mind's eye. He was a man who was destined to go through life and not around it. A man who was sure the shortest path to Heaven was straight through Hell. But the truth of his handicap lay only in a mind both exalted and crippled by too many stories and the path he chose to become one. Bobby Long's tragic flaw was his romance with all that he saw.

And were an epitaph be my story,
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

– Robert Frost

*****

Yep. That about sums it up.

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The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn burn burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

—Jack Kerouac

Sing it my brother. I'm with ya. People who are truly passionate about — anything, everything. That's what I try to find in myself and others. People who are bored really are boring.

Then again, Kerouac was writing about his friend Neal Cassady. Cassady was walking by a railroad track in Mexico after a party a few days shy of his forty-second birthday. He was trying to reach the next town over when he passed out on the tracks, in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. By the morning he was in a coma, and died a few hours later of exposure. Alchohol and drugs in his system probably didn't help. Mad and desirous.

'Course on the other hand you have the oh so Zen DGAFism. That's important too. Blessed is the one who simply says, "I don't care." It really helps when you're jotting notes at 3 in the morning because you're still wired, and desirous, and don't want to miss out on anything and...

Maybe it's a movie. You know, you're watching a movie that you're really into and you really feel it and you laugh and tear up and you get excited and you grip your seat and you are in-to-it. But you know it's just a movie, and you don't really care.

Passion-zen. © 2007, Jeremy Parnell. Sleep.......

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Related to a project I'm working on:

In the process of understanding and interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the whole, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole.

—David Couzens Hoy

Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to extend in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achive this harmony means that understanding has failed.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer