"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
Things others say that I want to remember.
People want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it that they will crawl through the desert for a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they will drink the sand.
People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
When through the water’s thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see is despite the water and the reflections there, I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is — which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself — the aqeous power, the syrupy and shimmering element — is in space; all this is not somewhere else, either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there; and if I raise my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence.
-Merleau-Ponty
Friday morning my sister ducked into my room to ask me what I was doing.
“Waiting for Texas to catch up with the rest of us,” I said, referring to the fact that I was waiting for someone in Texas to get to work.
“Oh. …that might take a few years.” and she turned and walked away.
My family rocks.
Another bad philosophy joke, this one courtesy the memorial blog for Mike Ford.
Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Goedel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. (The bar tender is still polishing Descartes’ glass.)
They look around, and Heisenberg says, “Is this some kind of joke? And if it’s a joke, is it funny?!”
Goedel answers, “In order to know if the joke is funny, we would have to be outside the joke, but we’re inside the joke, so we can’t tell if it’s funny.”
But Chomsky says, “Oh, it’s funny; you’re just not telling it right.”
Have you ever…have you ever had your life fall apart underneath you? Where suddenly everything and everyone that you trusted went away? It’s as if the ground moved out from under you, as if the world shifted and you didn’t belong anymore.
You get through it and you think that everything’s fine again. But you keep thinking that it will happen again. You watch. You see little signs that suggest things are going on under the surface of things. And you don’t know what they are. Someone is angry, and you know that they will vanish forever. Everything is too close to the surface.
-Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman