Whitman:
A shock electric, the night sustain'd it,
Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour'd out its myriads.
From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,
Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.
An earthquake this morning woke me up. S was doing work next to me. Did you feel that, she said, and I said I did. Or maybe I asked. I didn’t know if it was just a heavy truck rumbling outside, but then someone from far away texted—did you feel that, and someone else texted the same thing and so on. And for a brief second, the whole city was syncopated and synchronized. And the collective nervous system became aware of itself, before lapsing back into individualities.
I lack a mantra—something that I can tell myself that I believe in.
It's unfortunately just because in the absence of a firm inner rhythm there’s just work, produce, work, produce, work, produce, answer emails; that's not a philosophy, but a kind of neurotic inner taskmaster.1
I think the fear of losing hope is much more frightful than hopelessness.
Hopelessness knows what it is. But a nervous hope has no idea. It's a confused—a contradiction in terms.
We don't know why things are alive rather than dead. We don't know if it's better to be dead than alive. We don't know what death is.
The mathematics, the physics of nothingness, non-null, is and will always be the final frontier of thought.
Nothingness is a room at the end of a long corridor.
You can't know if the room is there for certain. You can't ever prove it. You can't ever return with proof. You can touch the handle. You can turn it. But can’t enter.
If philosophy is learning how to die, I think literature is about learning how to live. Vitality. Personality.
People don't fear death, really. They fear the death of the world around them. They fear the death of the lifeworld. Once that loses meaning—death is welcome.
When you have a civilization, people want to live in it. Because they have a context. They have a set of rules and goals, and when they don't, they don't.
Very, very few people want to live just to live. To be conscious of themselves. Very few people are capable of entertaining themselves. Inventing from nothing.2
I saw today that the economy lost 6,000 full-time jobs and added 600,000 part-time jobs. That seems about right. That will be most of the economy soon. Constant scuttling between gigs, everyone constantly answering everyone, constantly connected to maintain the flow of nature, economic nature, maintaining the economic ecology.
I think nature scatters such people through every generation in case there is a collapse. Because new values may have to be made from the ashes of the old. Which means to be a creative type, creator of values, is paradoxical: you only will find purpose if things break down around you.
"We don't know why things are alive rather than dead. We don't know if it's better to be dead than alive. We don't know what death is."
and yet our biology is constantly constantly constantly choosing life, desperately clinging to life. I always wonder how the human brain has evolved so far past our biology that we are constantly holding two contradictory yet unfettering truths: who knows if life is worth it, and living is the only thing that really matters. This is something that greatly confuses me.