That was a great treat. Thank you so much for gracing us with your presence. There must be a German word that can describe the delight I experience in hearing the sad ugly truth. What a relief! I mean, sir, you are preaching to the choir.
How do I spell relief? S-C-H-O-P-E-N .... H ... A-U .. E-R ....
The above post really should be put to music. In fact, Roger Waters's Amused To Death is just a perfect match. I will reread it with music.
C/C++ ... Python 2.7 ... SymPy, z3Py, NumPy, SciPy, Sage ... Python3 NOT ... Python 2.7 ... SymPy ... z3Py ... C++ ... It's all so mystical ... I like it.
And yet!
This species has amused itself to death!
Meanwhile, the crowd is cheering on "their" football team ... or getting mugged ... or hiding in a hole writing Catcher in the Rye ...
Your statement about how most people are more obsessed with putting things into their purse than into their heads made a tremendous impression upon me long ago. Thanks for the reminder!
In a society which measures its members worth by their "net assets", putting knowledge in one's head rather than chasing "success" takes courage and stubbornness. In fact, the greatest revenge in such a society is to take your advice about enjoying hours of solitary study, and yet I am amazed that someone can keep their lives together long enough to put together a "text book"! I know, I know, the precision is a grand illusion. No one sees the EDIT, EDIT, EDIT ... the typos and other errors. Just write a post spontaneously on the Internet and count the number of times you have to edit. I think of those who may never write anything for fear of revealing something they did not intend to reveal.
One can only be truly who one is in solitude. It is better to write to one person who cares about what you are writing than to write to a huge audience where there is bound to be some soul-suc-king bast-ard just waiting to cut you down and eat your spirit.
I've been losing myself in technical details lately. That's about as good as it gets if you're fortunate not to be an indigenous native locked in prison for 2 lifetimes + 7 years for supposedly having the audacity of defending yourself against agents of the State that now occupies the land where your ancestors have been buried for 20,000 years since crossing the Bering Strait.
I read your essays where you counseled us on how to get through a life not worth living. Stay out of the work-houses if possible, avoid marriage and procreation, and all that. I become enthusiastic about "book learning", but as with everything else, it can lead to disappointment to acknowledge just how little one can learn over very long periods of time, and how quickly circumstances can change.
When one beholds the countless living out their existence in the prisons and the wretched cities, it is understandable how one might come to deny oneself that "enjoyment of one's mental faculties" that you wrote about in Counsels and Maxims through guilt or shame for having eluded that fate ... and yet, one never knows when the worse is yet to come. The city is a nightmare world. One is wise to hide from the madness of "civilization".
Yes, when we get down into the moment by moment reality of our existence, it belongs in comedy, whereas from a distance it does indeed seem to be a horror.
In an instant, the comedy can turn into a horror.
Which one, out of the four, is the most important book, according to you? What I mean is, if one were well-versed in Kant, could one directly get started with Book II?
I liked the last book the best, but then, you know, that is the one that does flips in the air so that somehow this all-powerful will to live turns against itself in horror.
For over 20 years I have gradually come to agree with Schopenhauer. Well, I immediately agreed with him when I first read his work. I referred to myself as a Schopenhauer Disciple at age 24.
I met a young woman the following summer and became confused. I was even in some kind of sweat lodge ceremony in 1995 where I really struggled when hearing "prayers offered to the Great Spirit" ... One loses something when one destroys delusions that are so ingrained in our species: ideas about life being a "gift" from "the Creator" ... the feeling of sunshine upon one's skin and the magic power of water when we are truly thirsty ... but what about the ice cold wind that mercilessly freezes our warm blood? What about contaminated water that throws the body into Hell?
When one enters a certain level of honesty, when one attains a certain degree of mental independence, there is a price ...
Schopenhauer, you yourself proclaimed that if people want "peace of mind" then GO TO THE PRIESTS THEN, and leave the philosopher alone!
Well, we are left alone, for sure. It's the way it is.
And though we want to curse the ?#@&!%$ on the pulpit, we can't help it that a pack of lies makes the world go round. It is useless to fight it. And so we just go mad.
But we don't have to go mad. We don't have to be destroyed by it.
Oh, at some point along the way, we chose to honor our own truth, our own nonsense even ... over the farce of society.
It has to be this way.
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