Journals9
Newest
The Mysterious Stranger
2 min read
"It was only he that I was named for who ate of the fruit of the tree and then beguiled the man and the woman with it. We others are still ignorant of sin; we are not able to commit it; we are without blemish, and shall abide in that estate always. We--" Two of the little workmen were quarreling, and in buzzing little bumblebee voices they were cursing and swearing at each other; now came blows and blood; then they locked themselves together in a life-or-death struggle. Satan reached out his hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers, threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief, and went on talking where he had left off: "We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is."
...the wives of the little dead men had found the crushed and shapeless bodies, and were crying over them, and sobbing and lamenting, and a priest was kneeling there with his hands crossed upon his breast, praying; and crowds and crowds of pitying friends were massed about them, reverently uncovered, with their bare heads bowed, and many with the tears running down-- a scene which Satan paid no attention to until the small noise of the weeping and the praying began to annoy them, then he reached out and took the heavy board seat out of our swing and brought it down and mashed all those people into the earth just as if they had been flies, and went on talking just the same.
...the wives of the little dead men had found the crushed and shapeless bodies, and were crying over them, and sobbing and lamenting, and a priest was kneeling there with his hands crossed upon his breast, praying; and crowds and crowds of pitying friends were massed about them, reverently uncovered, with their bare heads bowed, and many with the tears running down-- a scene which Satan paid no attention to until the small noise of the weeping and the praying began to annoy them, then he reached out and took the heavy board seat out of our swing and brought it down and mashed all those people into the earth just as if they had been flies, and went on talking just the same.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Names
3 min read
I find a fair amount of interest in how names and words change meaning as the years pass, and, as I learn more and more of history, I continue to find examples that are either incapable of expressing fully the original meaning or entirely destroy it. To name two, "stoic" and "epicurean". The former now refers to a placidity, an unresponsiveness to tragedy; the latter is even worse: rather than simply removing the majority of meaning, it takes the opposite definition than the view of its progenitor; as "epicurean" has come to refer to a life of luxury and Epicurus had lived as far a life from luxury as one could imagine.
Stoicism had, in times past, been a philosophy of both ethics and logic. It had been founded by a Grecian named Zeno, whose own works have been lost to us. As his own ideas of stoicism are now gone, much of what we have is based on later stoicism (most well known of all being Marcus Aurelius, an emperor of Rome). The word "stoic" now has an entirely flat tone as compared to the original scope of the philosophical theory. Stoicism had been rooted in determinism. Aurelius wrote of the idea of the Universe (which he also called God, Reason, Nature, and Fate) being the whole of which we were a part. This whole caused and continues to cause all events. Because of this determinism, Aurelius saw it as fairly pointless to show undue emotion because of "bad" events (seeing it, in fact, as impious, as to call calamities "evil" would insult what Nature brought forth). However much this freedom from emotional excesses may seem to grant, the entirety of his works were extremely depressed and bitter, noting "The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time" and "Death is a release...from desires that make us their puppets." As ought not be surprising from one of the darkest philosophies in ethics, stoicism allows for, and even advocates at times, suicide (which is how Zeno left life).
Epicurean ethical theory is, at its base, an ethic of happiness. It speaks mostly of pleasures and pains (which is, I suppose, from where the common definition came). However, Epicurus's definition of "pleasure" spoke either of the lack of physical and mental pain or of the enjoyment of physical actions (such as eating, sleeping, and drinking) to such an extent that one does not cause later pain to oneself. As luxury, to Epicurus, almost inevitably would lead to greater pains further down the line, he stuck to bread and water (cheese would be a luxury in his eyes) and remained abstinent.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Socrates
1 min read
Someone will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a
course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely
end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a
man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the
chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether
in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the
part of a good man or of a bad.
course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely
end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a
man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the
chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether
in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the
part of a good man or of a bad.
-Plato, Apology
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Borges
1 min read
"In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology."
The Library of Babel
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Something that few seem to know
3 min read
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost was not meant to be an inspirational piece. It was meant to be a piece regarding regret, and one's self-convincing that he or she has made the right choice. The very title gives a hint to this. "The Road Not Taken". The focus is on the choice that could have been made, but wasn't. When one makes a choice between two equally good paths, and when one is "sorry [he or she] could not travel both", human psychology, scumbag that it is, will tend to saddle the psyche with "what if"s.
In words better than I could have used:
"But you yourself can resurrect it from zombie-hood by reading it—not with imagination, even, but simply with accuracy. Of the two roads the speaker says "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." In fact, both roads 'that morning lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.' Meaning: Neither of the roads is less traveled by. These are the facts; we cannot justifiably ignore the reverberations they send through the easy aphorisms of the last two stanzas.
This poem does not advise. It does not say, 'When you come to a fork in the road, study the footprints and take the road less traveled by'. The ironic tone is inescapable: 'I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.' The speaker anticipates his own future insincerity—his need, later on in life, to rearrange the facts and inject a dose of Lone Ranger into the account. He knows that he will be inaccurate, at best, or hypocritical, at worst, when he holds his life up as an example. In fact, he predicts that his future self will betray this moment of decision as if the betrayal were inevitable. This realization is ironic and poignantly pathetic. But the 'sigh' is critical. The speaker will not, in his old age, merely gather the youth about him and say, 'Do what I did, kiddies. I stuck to my guns, took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.' Rather, he may say this, but he will sigh first; for he won't believe it himself. Somewhere in the back of his mind will remain the image of yellow woods and two equally leafy paths."
I suppose that my English teacher's irritation with Hallmark for twisting the poem has overtaken me a tad.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In