“Are you telling me not to investigate the natural world? Are you trying to bar me from the whole of it and restrict me to a part of it? Am I not to inquire how everything in the universe began, who gave things form, who separated them out when they were all plunged together in a single great conglomeration of inert matter?

Am I not to inquire into the identity of the artist who created that universe? Or the process by which this huge mass became subject to law and order? Or the nature of the one who collected the things that were scattered apart, sorted apart the things that were commingled, and when all things lay in formless chaos allotted them their individual shapes?

Or the source of the light (is it fire or is it something brighter?) that is shed on us in such abundance? Am I supposed not to inquire into this sort of thing? Am I not to know where I am descended from, whether I am to see this world only once or be born into it again time after time, what my destination is to be after my stay here, what abode will await my soul on its release from the terms of its serfdom on earth? Are you forbidding me to associate with heaven, in other words ordering me to go through life with my eyes bent on the ground? I am too great, was born to too great a destiny to be my body’s slave. So far as I am concerned that body is nothing more or less than a fetter on my freedom.

I place it squarely in the path of fortune, letting her expend her onslaught on it, not allowing any blow to get through it to my actual self.

For that body is all that vulnerable about me:  within this dwelling so liable to injury there lives a spirit that is free. Never shall that flesh compel me to feel fear, never shall it it drive me to any pretense unworthy of a good man; never shall I tell a lie out of consideration for this petty body. I shall dissolve our partnership when this seems the proper course, and even now while we are bound one to the other the partnership will not be on equal terms: the soul will assume undivided authority.

Refusal to be influenced by one’s body assures one’s freedom.”

Letter LXXVII  (Seneca- Letters from a Stoic)

ALDOUS HUXLEY

(“Consolation for Unpopularity” – Excerpt from Alain de Botton’s “The Consolations of Philosophy”)

“…Paint her arms like Aurora’s, and her smiles like Hebe’s:- But no, dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to something more within its power: and the next article brought forward should naturally be myself…

As to the Opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that…and…you may as well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum: that, and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighborhood.”

a) “And boredom, let’s face it, is a problem that many of us have come to associate with books…One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.”

b) “As you were probably beginning to suspect, the preceding nonsense was a crude attempt to deflect attention away from the dismal brevity of this month’s “Books Read” list: for the first time since I began writing for this magazine, I have completely lost my appetite for books.”

c) “I picked up Candide because my publishers sent me a cute new edition, and though that in itself wouldn’t have persuaded me, I flicked through it and discovered it was only ninety pages long….The trouble with Candide is that it’s one of those books that we’ve all read, whether we’ve read it or not. The meat was picked off it and thrown to the crowd in the eighteenth century, and…I’ll abandon this metaphor here, because I suspect that it must inevitably conclude with digestive systems and the consumption of ancient excrement.”

All these are excerpts from “Housekeeping V.S. The Dirt”, a collection of chronicles written for the Believer magazine. An excellent voyage into his intimacy and relation to what he reads, or thinks he should have read, and what he ended up reading. There are a few volumes to this collection of essays. All of them, obviously, worth reading with affectionate attention.

What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!

- Thomas Mann

2. (Philosophy) (in Existentialist Philosophy) the dread caused by man’s awareness that his future is not determined but must be freely chosen 

As viagens não têm destino

É o meu oásis predilecto

A cabeça chega ao tecto e não há fim para a eternidade do ser

Sou todos e um em mutação num degradé de cores sem definição

Os pés já não tocam no chão.

Sê meu irmão

Deixe a consciência no sítio e siga o coração

As lágrimas caem-me na mão

mas não chegam a pegar fogo nas raízes do amor

Quero sentir as lágrimas.

Assola-me o desejo de sentir pena

Mas num segundo torna-se em comédia.

Passo as horas em constante mutação.

Não tenho coração

É só uma questão de preocupação.

This is a redo, a scribble line, scratch over, or ex-out, to try again because the first time was unsuccessful, but that’s ok that type of success is perfection; perfection, a quality or condition of being perfect. Perfect people are freaks of nature, mutants, inhuman, snaggle tooth with spit drips off the tooth. One eye bigger than the other, the big ones a goggle eye, bobs around everywhere. Punched up pig nose swollen and fat in the front where it turns up to make the stout, and because of this it has a snoring problem that can be heard from three rooms down. Hunch backed with not hands but mitts, and pigeon toed; perfect, but our nature is the sludge we came out of. We came out dirty and messy through genitals that excrete waste and substance to create a life, or accepting that life creating substance depending on gender. Our first taste of air is through a mucus membrane that you ripped from momma’s womb, we came in beautiful and filthy, and a real human isn’t ashamed of their body, and the sounds and smells from it, a real human has no shame but we go out dirty not clean and perfect…wait wait let me try again im not saying it right. This is a Redo, getting a little closer and the pictures getting cleaner, but there are still blurs, slurs, and fuzzy spots in the picture. So we went back to fix what we half of kind of sort of did to make sure it can stand strong and this time we weren’t perfecting, but constructing to make a structure stand firm and solid, so the ground could shake for a thousand days and tornados blow a thousand nights….wait wait wait let me redo this again. though we as a race of creatures can be strong, unmovable, caring, and heartfelt we can still fuck it up even thought we got it done. We can rip strips of jagged piece of papers in haste to write our names on them for chance at the prize. You can also get the scissors and neatly make small rectangular shapes with class for these names to be placed….hold up this isn’t right either I got to retry the last restart, to regain my momentum of what im saying…THIS IS a REDO, im redoing everything cause I didn’t get it right the first time only perfect soulless creatures aka electronice, comuter and robots can do it theres no feeling or learning only knowing. I did it a second time and thought I was getting it the message was written with bad penmanship and the wirting was fucked half assed and though the message wasn’t so much gotten as it was forced through jagged and raw made its way to your door stop barley legible enough to understand it, and this third time which is a lie about it being a charm I was striving to make it a little better go back and edit some things around take word or two out and replace the swears with funny little substitutes, from shit to snkies. The point is don’t strive to be perfect just better, aw shoots let me redo this.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Spinoza