Knowledge

To have knowledge is to discover, to discern what was previously unperceived, and perhaps the parts of the word itself carry a warning about the nature of such a realisation – that the moment one comes into knowledge of something, one crosses a line, one steps over an edge into an unfamiliar darkness the dimensions of which only slowly become apparent, a "ledge" beyond which gravity loses its certainty and after which we may be free to fall.

To have knowledge, then, is to subject oneself to considerable danger, to the whim of fact that may come either as a dawn of realisation or a discovery that plunges one into an abyss. This is because hope lies in the indeterminate, the ambiguous and the unknown. It is curiosity that places us at the rim of the precipice, yet ironically it is also hope that makes us take the step into space.

To want to have knowledge is therefore a leap of faith. We stand at the threshold with our hearts wildly beating, our breath faltering, our souls rigid as the firmness of faith fights our fear of falling, and the struggle might lead to a standstill if it were not for a lingering doubt in all things human. We fall forward finally with the weight of a question mark on our backs.

Falling, is therefore about the loss of innocence, and if we fall what rushes toward us with the violence of reality is then the hugeness of consequence, the inevitability of The End because ignorance is no longer a defence and the one invisible force we can believe in turns out to be gravity. It is about Adam and Eve, but it is also about Abraham and Isaac.

Knowledge, then, is as much about knowing the lines we are about to cross as it is about knowing the truth. To have knowledge is also to know the ledge we cannot step over: the dreams we should have never have lived in, the memories we should never have lived out, the words we should have left unshared. We will fall hard and fast when we step unknowingly over that ledge, if we do not have the faith to walk on air.

Hong Kong

Edith Wharton once said that if we all stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time, and I guess that applies to our trip to Hong Kong. The first thought that probably came to my mind when I arrived was that Hong Kong was somehow a real city, founded firmly on the strength of capitalism and the principle of laissez faire, the buildings arrayed and aligned according to the will of the invisible hand rather than governmental edict. After the somewhat regimental nature of the past two years, Hong Kong provided a stark contrast with its unfettered lifestyle and freewheeling rollercoasters, though the unrelenting push of market forces did seem to take its toll on pedestrian walking speeds and general stress levels amongst the population. Still the food was good, Ocean Park was great, Macau amazingly glitzy and the company awesome, so the trip overall turned out splendid :)

On the other hand, I think the rollercoasters in Hong Kong prepared me well for the reeling and lurching of my first few driving lessons.

The flowers of the field

Life has been familiar, comfortable and commonplace in a thoroughly satisfying way, with none of the edginess, disquiet and desperate pursuits that characterize so much of our time. This must be what a happy retirement is like, where time and freedom are synonymous with each other and life is a handpicked assortment of people, places and events, filled with enough decadence and laughter to put the past into perspective and enough convenient surprises and fulfilled expectations to make so much of the future worth looking forward to.

All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.

- 1 Peter 1:24

Choosing life

I think I've seen it quite often in the past few months; we shouldn't let emotions get the better of us, especially the bitter, acrimonious feelings that tend to turn people into sullen and petulant beings. We assume that all thoughts and actions emanate essentially from character and personality, but all too often forget that caustic and resentful sentiments and behaviour in turn have the insidious effect of corroding the bits of goodness in people, leaving behind what is acrid and acerbic, like something gone bad.

Two of the greatest tragedies occur when a person's expectations are incongruent with his abilities, or when the circumstances that life deals to him are incommensurate with the potential that nature has endowed him with. But the protagonist in either case need not be a tragic hero, like a Macbeth drawing arms against morality and destiny, nor like a Miltonian Satan falling further into a darkness not of the Deep but of his own creation. A person of real ability would take life into his hands, and not crush it, but shape it into a design of his own choosing.

These days

I think it's a mistake to accept life's banalities without discrimination or discernment, to let those prosaic insipidities accumulate like a descending mist of tiny, indivisible and irreducible errands, slowly filling up the bracket of each day, the hours devoured by the trite, the tedious and the trivial. Consciousness is a disposition too complex to be concerned with what is stale and vapid, and what takes over when consciousness melts away is the same insentient, obtuse oblivion that keeps the clouds afloat and gives worker ants their zest for labour.

Sometimes colour seems to drain from the world, especially in moments like these when the streets are filling up with rain and you can't tell the hour of the day by the shade of the sky, and time spends itself in the slow, steady count of one to twelve. I spend it on the piano, with a book, or in thought, during days like these when the world is washing out to sea in the rain. Thankfully there'll be no space for banalities in the next few months, because life has been too good for that: life, which we should speak of only in the present tense, and though we may wave to the past and at the future, we must remember to spend our time in the present doing more than waving. I also remember you, for life reminds me about you, and you remind me about living.

How shall a man be purple?

When Florus was deliberating whether he should go down to Nero's spectacles and also perform in them himself, Agrippinus said to him, "Go down": and when Florus asked Agrippinus, "Why do not you go down?" Agrippinus replied, "Because I do not even deliberate about the matter." For he who has once brought himself to deliberate about such matters, and to calculate the value of external things, comes very near to those who have forgotten their own character. For why do you ask me the question, whether death is preferable or life? I say "life." "Pain or pleasure?" I say "pleasure." But if I do not take a part in the tragic acting, I shall have my head struck off. Go then and take a part, but I will not. "Why?" Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those which are in the tunic. Well then it was fitting for you to take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?

- Epictetus: The Discourses, How a Man on every occasion can maintain his Proper Character

Today

Freedom is a word spelt in three letters, and fittingly enough, in capitals. The date had always been approaching, but in fits and starts, sometimes magnified out of proportion by occasional spells of euphoria or delusion, sometimes shrinking back into microscopic insignificance when seen across the vast distance and darkness of sleepless 50 km road marches. There is no need nor reason to sentimentalise the experience, because it swayed between banality and burnout, but letting these two years lapse without having taken notice of those odd moments worth remembering would have been a waste, for there were people worth appreciating and events worth reliving.

We are all in search of lost time; we are all looking for the threads that used to bind the most ineffable moments of our lives together, and what we cannot regain we have to wait for, and we wait in the hope that what we cannot find, someone we have yet to meet will return to us with smiles and kind words.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only..." - Charles Dickens

The Night Shadows

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is preferable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Frozen air

He had been sitting in his room for too long, his thoughts and dreams hanging silently around him like balloons, some growing soft under the weight of the stillness and drooping in midair like overripe fruit, some already shrunken and shrivelled on the floor, when a sudden breeze pushed open the windows and batted at his kingdom of frozen air, releasing at once the turbidity of his life in a liberating rush that sent the balloons dancing across the room and out from the window, upward and outward at the invitation of the sky, a constellation of colour that vanished at last into the expanse of glowing blue, the disappearance of dreams looking for their own dimensions.

Perchance to dream

He had always believed there had to be a place somewhere for all the thoughts that had been thought and then thrown out, the ideas scrutinised and swept away; he had imagined a sort of cave where the dreams dreamed and ditched shook off the dust and breathed themselves to life again, or an immense plain where grand passions lived and forsaken endured without end, where everybody's lives were bound like ribbons soaring and cascading at the end of meaning's kite. For him, the past was painted at one end of the sky and the future at the other, and in the present were the endless succession of dreams he lived in and would live out, every one of them, for as long as it took, and then for ever.

A manifesto of faith

I have read nothing more gracious and true than this for a long time; it is nothing less than a proclamation of how to remain faithful to self and to God in a world with enough curiosity to ask questions but not enough fortitude to answer them:

"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God; who hath saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began."

- 2 Timothy 1:7-9

On Roth and Kundera

Philip Roth writes the most amazing sentences; he threads together sparkling strings of words that throw off lights and colours at once bizarre and wonderful, comical and tragic, laden with meaning but flashing with the odd gleam of the absurd. His fiction is unashamedly fictional, his narratives never missing a turn for the comic, the tangent of the tale never missing a beat and never missing a trick. Milan Kundera’s works, in contrast, are more allegorical than absurdist: his novels describe worlds where gravity is literally defied, where weight and lightness are inverted, and humanity is shaken to pieces by the laughter of angels and devils. While it is the fertility of Roth’s imagination that imbues his plots with a delirious comic energy, it is the poverty of Kundera’s world that leads him to create meaning, through his own fiction, out of a past that was harrowing and a future that is forbidding.

The dark overtones Kundera paints, tied to the shadowy history of his country, give his tales of joking angels and children’s islands an unshakeable sense of realism that is too painful to be absurdist, too ironic to be comic, and yet too empty to be ironic, too laughable to be really funny. Yet the laughter in Kundera’s novels has nothing of the halting, awkward Pinteresque quality, like a bad joke that falls flat. On the contrary, it is a laughter as otherworldly as it is tragic, “real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide…bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad…and we laugh our laughter to the infinity of laughter…O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly.” This is the sound that is heard in “the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all words with its jangle.”

Insistent and exigent in Kundera’s novels is an element of self-awareness that subverts all comedy, “the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch”, the metaphysical recognition of one’s own misery that gives litost its torment. Kundera’s characters refer to themselves as Sisyphus, and the boulders they roll up the hill are the burdens they bear for each other; in his novels there is nothing of the scorn that Camus argued would surmount any fate, that would allow us to “imagine Sisyphus happy”. His characters do not laugh with joy. It is the madness of their laughter that gives their laughter its madness.

The time of our lives

Some things I've begun to realise: that living life at a walking pace, living from day to day wholly in the present, without a foot in the past or a hand reaching for the future, is infinitely better than chasing sunlight around the globe and inhabiting the darkness at the brink of a horizon. This is not only the best way to live, it is what life is, the only thing; nothing else is real. We have to live in the sunlight that comes upon us with the inevitability of life itself; we have to live with it, and nothing immaterial can stand up to its dazzling, effulgent glare: the figments of imagination, the ghosts of the past, all exorcised in a single incandescent affirmation that the world is all that is the case, and anything that is not radiant with the immediacy of life we ought to hurl into the fire. The pipe dreams, the hopes held out, the promises unrelinquished, the implications and the inferences and the infelicities are all like ashes in one's mouth, and the sounds of our laughter and wailing should echo and roll away from the single point that is the now: life lived on the knife-edge of time.

When I say

When I say I miss you, it will not be
for the whisper of petals too thin and tremulous
to stay silent about beauty. It will not be
for the trees that hold their arms out
for love, and try to bridge their distance
to the sky. It will not be
for the recurrence of wind and water
or the moaning of the birds
saying they have seen it all.

When I say I miss you,
it is for the silence of the stones and the shadows.
It is for the sediment of age,
the gathering of rain on windowpanes
and the absence of dust on the things
you smiled at.
It is for the howls and the sounds of struggle
that echo across the gap
from pen to page.

It is for the moments when you vanish
from the gaps within the crowd,
for the old habit of thinking you will
reappear, when you are already
receding with distance and in time:
for the last wave,
the last smile, before you
drop from sight.

Lifetimes

He was going too quickly
when she wasn't looking;
he loved the rush
and she adored sunsets,
the trajectory of two lives
like lines in the sand,
ending in right angles.

Perhaps it was
curiosity in the eye,
or hunger in the belly;
maybe it was
love in the heart
or poetry on the mind.
But life has not been harsh
to those who die
with an eyeful of beauty.

We are fools in love,
fools in hope and hatred;
we are fools with time to spare
and innocence to lose.

We make fools of each other.

We are foolish to learn
what fools are like:
that life has fooled us all,
and in death we become

the greatest fools of all.

Dirge without Music

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
_____________________

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
______________________

Words like these make me remember why, amidst all the articles, essays, dialogues, critiques and treatises in the world, a poem can be the most important thing of all.

Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels begin as if with no story in mind, and finish with no end in sight. His narratives hold nothing more than a drift of banalities, the latency of meaning slowly revealed by the accumulating welter of broken thoughts, fractured recollections and fragmented moments of awareness that hazily reflect a crippled and riven world. His characters stand distant from one another, fumbling at the meaning of each other’s sentences, reaching out clumsily and desperately for the companionship of another human being but finally unable to find sincerity, interminably subverted and thwarted by lapses of understanding and lengths of awkward Pinteresque silences. But amidst the anguish and anticipation of human interaction, nobody remains unaware of the indelible influences of age and change in a world that has quietly left them behind. In the last pages of Ishiguro’s most recent novel, he leaves no space even for catharsis; there is no sense of direction nor even the finality of death. Meaning and memory ebb away into an endless vanishing point: “I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up… The fantasy never got beyond that — I didn’t let it — and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

The imprecision of metaphor

You are the only person I cannot respond to with any pretense; you make me laugh out of your delight, reveal my thoughts because you want to know them, and forget my direction because you are heading another way. You cause the pages of my books to empty themselves of meaning, the chatter of Plato and other ghosts to fall silent; you make the questions of physics and politics grow strangely distant, and literature more and more terribly beautiful. You are the imprecision of metaphor that sets poetry free. I cannot think of you without the world slowly growing perfect; I cannot respond to you without recourse to poetry, and it is a strange thing to be writing about you. It is like writing about inspiration.

And so it goes
and so it goes
and so will you soon, I suppose.

Of another age

Music is perhaps best listened to rather than talked about, but I suppose what enchants me most about Chopin's music is precisely this quality of emotional purity that language cannot grasp and that words would only tarnish. The melodic curves waltz into view without presumption or presentiment, perfectly attuned to the volatility of the composer's emotions, switching with capriciousness between fragile, iridescent cadences, and the mad perpendicular rush of octaves, somehow bound together in a unity of form that is as immoderate and improbable as life itself. As Rubinstein observes, "All over the world men and women know his music. They love it. They are moved by it. Yet it is not 'Romantic music' in the Byronic sense. It does not tell stories or paint pictures. It is expressive and personal, but still a pure art. Even in this abstract atomic age, where emotion is not fashionable, Chopin endures. His music is the universal language of human communication."

The works of classical artists dominate our imaginations for the brief moments they are heard or read. Goethe's poems occasionally seem to linger far too long in our minds for comfort, like the consciousness of another age bridging history with the leap of a sentence. These works are timeless not only because genius transcends time, but because values are enduringly universal; they are the representations of a culture mankind has left behind in the sweep of history, but they are also the abiding echoes of an element of human nature that individuals have forfeited in the wake of progress. In Goethe's own words, "Everything nowadays is ultra; everything transcends, in thought and in deeds. No one knows himself anymore, no one understands the element in which he moves and acts, no one the material with which he is working. Young people get stirred up much too early, and then are carried away by the whirlpool of the times...thereby only to persist in mediocrity." We can do no worse than to allow the sentimentalism of another age to grace the quotidian existence of modern living.

Between being and nothingness

The Sorrows of Young Werther
________________________
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I honor religion, you know that, I feel it is a staff for many weary souls, refreshment for many a one who is pining away. But — can it, must it, be the same thing for everyone? If you look at the great world, you see thousands for whom it wasn't, thousands for whom it will not be the same, preached or unpreached, and must it then be the same for me? Does not the son of God Himself say that those would be around Him whom the Father had given Him? But if I am not given? If the Father wants to keep me for Himself, as my heart tells me? — I beg you, do not misinterpret this, do not see mockery in these innocent words. What I am laying before you is my whole soul; otherwise I would rather have kept silent, as I do not like to lose words over things that everyone knows as little about as I do. What else is it but human destiny to suffer out one's measure, to drink up one's cup? — And if the chalice was too bitter for the God from heaven on His human lips, why should I boast and pretend that it tastes sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed in the terrible moment when my entire being trembles between being and nothingness, since the past flashes like lightning above the dark abyss of the future and everything around me is swallowed up, and the world perishes with me? — Is that not the voice of the creature thrown back on itself, failing, trapped, lost, and inexorably tumbling downward, the voice groaning in the inner depths of its vainly upwards-struggling energies: My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? And if I should be ashamed of the expression, should I be afraid when facing that moment, since it did not escape Him who rolls up heaven like a carpet?

Philosophy and religion

I think the best philosophical works exhibit not just the rigour of logic and reason but also the creative vision of original thought; it is in the largesse of the philosophical imagination that brilliant new solutions to old problems emerge, often in the dimensions of startling new paradigms that are the manifestation of genius. Yet the deepest questions of philosophy are borne out of the same source as our simplest but most profound human concerns — questions about meaning, identity, God and values — and this is where the philosophical and literary imaginations converge, in the common vein of human curiosity and wonder.

The philosophies of so many thinkers seem to return again and again to the concept of God, whether in their metaphysical, ethical, aesthetical or epistemological works, tussling with the hypothetical existence of a deity that is both a philosophical problem and a solution. For Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, philosophy may be human reason acting on its own to discover truth, but theology is human reason acting in the light of divine revelation. Yet both his teleological arguments and St. Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God in Proslogium fail to establish a logically unassailable basis for belief; later-day thinkers like Hume and Kant dispose of them with ease. A number of philosophers devote many pages to anti-theism, lashing out tirelessly at the walls of every establishment and doctrine fortified by a faith in God. Nietzsche goes so far as to build his philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the onslaught of his atheist jihad, indicting mankind with the crime of a “slave revolt” that has inverted master morality, a misdeed manifested most dramatically by a suffering God on the Cross. Hegel blames Christianity for the alienation of man from the realisation that he has an infinite value as a part of the Absolute.

But for every philosopher seeking to falsify the notion of God, there seems to be another whose philosophy validates the necessity of a deity’s existence. Berkeley’s dictum of “Esse est percipi” leads him to postulate the need for God as an omnipresent observer; interestingly enough, even Kant admits the need for a supersensible agency capable of ensuring we can achieve the “summum bonum”, or the highest good. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he proposes that “the highest good is possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature”, and that this is God. Hegel himself was a Lutheran, and it surely cannot be denied that his theory of the Absolute Idea in his Phenomenology of Spirit, as Mind comes to realise itself, sounds decidedly panentheistic.

But such philosophies perhaps will always face the charge that what they lack, they leave to God, and possibly there is some truth in the argument that our imperfect minds are unable to grasp what might easily be comprehended by a higher-order intelligence. Thus in the matter of God's existence, I prefer Kierkegaard’s philosophy, established on a refutation of a paradox described in Plato’s Meno. For Kierkegaard, the leap of faith can only be taken with a teacher’s assistance; unless the learner’s nature has been transformed through an act of divine grace he cannot perform it. In Philosophical Fragments, I believe he depicts faith for what it is, in its most honest and accurate expression: “But in that sense is not Faith as paradoxical as the Paradox? Precisely so; how else would it have the Paradox for its object, and be happy in its relation to the Paradox? Faith itself is a miracle, and all that holds true of the Paradox also holds true of faith.”

It is probably this version of the defence of religious faith and the existence of God that Wittgenstein refers to when he comments, in an illuminating and typically inspired use of analogy: “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”

The question of philosophy

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves, because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes the highest good.

- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

The past two years

Now that the toils and trials of these two years are slowly coming to a close, perhaps it’s best to record a little of what I remember from those long and unusual days before they begin to fade away in a blur of green and brown. The past two years have been nothing less than a chapter of my life, and I’ve emerged from them none the worse for the wear, perhaps still slightly bewildered by the force with which it tore into my life, swept it from the comfortable tracks of a smooth, beaten path, left it literally spinning into the deepest reaches of another world, then whisked itself completely from my life with the same familiar, careless, violent rapidity with which it kicked over my closeted world.

Reflection upon any period of time that has gone by is always susceptible to tricks of the mind, to lapses in memory and the rosy glow of nostalgia; the hard edges of even the most trying and difficult times are somehow rounded and smoothened by the unconscious recognition that those episodes need only, and will only be experienced once. We have all gone through those events, one by one, like active spectators in a protracted and hugely tiring movie, wrenched ourselves through the Orwellian Physical Jerks of fitness training and foot drills, embraced numbers for names, gawked at the monumental and impregnable nature of Ministries and insuperable bureaucracies, guzzled the numbing Victory Gin of heavily-subsidised, diluted beer, chanted the indistinguishable slogans of Parties and assorted establishments, even adopted a Newspeak-like jargon of unintelligible unintelligibility. We have all gone through these things, or rather they have passed us by, our bodies performing the actions requisite of the present, our minds still haunted by memories of the pleasant past, or inhabited by intimations of a brighter future.

Accompanying the string of events that has transpired over the past two years has been a long chain of curious, remarkable human beings, some of them with whom I have fallen away, fallen apart, fallen out. Many of them, though, have remained, and become far more than just acquaintances, and their companionship has been absolutely uplifting, their presence steadying in times of shakiness. By learning about them, I have learnt a great deal from them, in particular the nature of social worlds I had never heretofore been exposed, about vastly dissimilar definitions of success, priorities and goals, diverse attitudes and perspectives, and frequently hugely different sets of values; it has often been nothing short of a glowing alternate paradigm of life. Values, however, are the creeds that we live by, and it is important to be discriminatory about what should be our own values without being unnecessarily critical about those of others.

The end of this year, closing in as surely and as congenially as the prow of a boat bumping gently into the docks as it returns from sea, is undoubtedly a welcome prospect, not least because it augurs the recovery of a familiar lifestyle and social environment. Some aches and pains linger on, naturally, from the journey, some of them the traces of old regrets from a long time ago that coalesce every now and then. I will always be rueing some missed opportunities. But for now, only the happiness attendant to the experience of emerging from the thickness of jungle foliage after a partially-failed navigational exercise, compass in one hand and clenched fist in the other, upon a well-used and strangely familiar road.

Falsifying Popper

Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, most fully developed in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, seems increasingly to me like an offshoot of philosophical scepticism, disguised as a solution to the problems of scientific induction as described by Hume. It is a sort of exercise in negativity, a kind of deductive process carried out backward. Like Cartesian doubt, it partakes in casting a pallor of uncertainty over science and scientific progress; unlike Cartesian rationalism, Popperian falsificationism ends in an empty, destructive scepticism with no foundationalist follow-up. In any case, falsification itself seems to fail the test of philosophical doubt. Scientific theories are subjected to repeated tests not only to ensure the veracity of conclusions, but also to limit the effect of unwanted external influences upon general experimental results — disturbances occurring during measurement, impure substances, the dirt on a Petri dish and other, frequently unforeseeable but possibly highly-damaging experimental anomalies. Methods of measurement, observation and experimentation themselves are surely also theory-laden, and therefore subject to a certain degree of uncertainty. It is not difficult to see how methodological falsification falters in these respects in a similar manner, because experimental tests conducted to falsify a particular hypothesis leave themselves open to doubt to an equivalent degree; one might say they become theories in their own right, requiring repeated experimentation to verify their own negative hypotheses and limit experimental error, and perhaps consequently falling into the same inductivist trap that falsificationism was originally invented to avoid.

Poohism

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

- A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Jar of wishes

You lie hidden somewhere within my jar of wishes, buried in the layers where the old dreams lie, in the detritus of fading, failing things: between the faltering shine of foreign coins, of silent stained marbles and broken immobile toys, within a collage of dated stamps, old movie tickets and dented badges. I have built buildings and planes upon this foundation of lost limbs and other half-constructed things, and in the crowded troposphere of my jar, cities breathe and blink. But you are the pattern of my dreams, the twinkle of the constellations that continue to glimmer and glow, though the lights in the cities may be slowly fading, the marbles losing their lustre and the coins their gleam — even as those dreams go out one by one, like fireflies in a jar.

Recriminations

This has been one of those weeks that leave you in a sort of bewildered stupor, uncertain and unsettled in a way that makes it thoroughly impossible to see how the bits of your life ever once fit together in a pattern that used to make some sort of sense. Sometimes it's difficult not to become inhabited by the echoes of the past, to extract yourself from those memories which are in themselves utterly inextricable from the reverberations of regret, from the silence of unasked questions and unbegotten answers. Patience isn't always a virtue; it's possible to have waited too diligently and too persistently, for a season of ripeness that has in fact slipped past already, past the time of blooming and withering, and those missed opportunities lie festering and rotting on the ground with all the putrefying condemnation of regret.

First They Came

by Martin Niemöller
___________________

In Germany, they came first for the Communists
And I didn't speak up
Because I wasn't a Communist.

And then they came for the trade unionists
And I didn't protest
Because I wasn't a trade unionist.

And then they came for the Jews
And I remained silent
Because I wasn't a Jew.

And then they came for me
And by that time
There was no one left to speak up.

Innocence

your apologies fall
like alphabets from the sky—
light, loquacious, and
ridiculous.
and I'm sorry
that you're not more apologetic;
the auguries of your
innocence have a way
of making me feel
ashamed.

so I pick up
your guiltless excuses, and
patch in the holes with them,
paint the walls of my world with
your faultless smiles, and
gird my doorways with the
strength of your convictions.

for it is
the license of naivete
to love,
and the naivete of love
to lie.

_____________

Sometimes I think our values are products of our experiences, so perhaps we should be more receptive to the idea that as our lives change, our values can develop as well. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, even if you don't like the drink. It may well turn out to be an acquired taste.

She Walks In Beauty

by Lord Byron
_____________

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Things fall away

Sometimes, in life, you stagger on with your arms full of the things you want to hold on to, when it is obvious that the extent of your embrace only encompasses that much, and the clasp of your arms reaches only so far.

But your dull recognition of this sad fact only begins when things start to slip and tumble from over, under, and between your arms, and the rest of the items still wrought in your grasp reorientate themselves to fill in the gaps left by what fell away. And then you are aware of nothing but the burgeoning, unbearable lightness that is left in your clutches, and you heave and ache with the grievous weight of a vacuum in your arms, while the entire world is running out to sea around you.

And still you stagger on like a dismantling doll, bleeding from the holes left behind when parts of you came off together with the pieces of your world that fell away, disintegrating into the backwash with a final whispering hiss, that is the last breath of loss.

The poem that took the place of a mountain

by Wallace Stevens
__________________

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wasteland

And it woke in me again, like a pathogen that was insidious and insistent and invincible, a chimera reawakened; and all I could sense was the roar that plumbed the unknown depths of an abyss that quaked and shuddered from somewhere within me, and that slammed the blood in my ears with a tidal force threatening to obliterate every barrier and boundary.

But in the wasteland that I inhabit, there is only a silence that the swirling and the sound fail to conceal, and amidst the detritus of my world are the wide and winding inroads you have haunted for so long. You may not know it, but it is blood that wells up, like the inheritance of the dusk, from within the cracks in my heart that meander after your every footfall.

Constancy

I've always appreciated change, the relentless force that pushes life onward and outward in all directions and deviations across the mercurial pattern of days. But the truly valuable things are those that endure, insufferably, in a slow and stately manner the ebb and flow of every whim and inconsistency — the threads that remain unbroken, the roots that dig deeper with time into the impoverished soil of modern living, and that bind together with an unaccountable firmness what is effete and inebriated, like the grasp of God's hand.

Proslogium

The Ontological Proof
__________________
St. Anselm

Truly there is a God, although the fool has said in his heart, There is no God.

AND so, Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you knowest it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe. And indeed, we believe that you are a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the fool has said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalms xiv. 1). But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak—a being than which nothing greater can be conceived—understands what be hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist.

For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists. When a painter first conceives of what he will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding, but be does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, be both has it in his understanding, and he understands that it exists, because he has made it.

Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.

Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

AND it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being you are, O Lord, our God.

So truly, therefore, do you exist, O Lord, my God, that you can not be conceived not to exist; and rightly. For, if a mind could conceive of a being better than you, the creature would rise above the Creator; and this is most absurd. And, indeed, whatever else there is, except you alone, can be conceived not to exist. To you alone, therefore, it belongs to exist more truly than all other beings, and hence in a higher degree than all others. For, whatever else exists does not exist so truly, and hence in a less degree it belongs to it to exist. Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalms xiv. 1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that you do exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool?

Perplexity

Recent events have made me feel that my command of language is slowly slipping away, and I feel a creeping suspicion that this really is the case. I vaguely remember Wittgenstein’s description of language as a net, and his thesis that the reason for all our philosophical quandaries and conundrums is our imperfect use of the language, or the imperfections of the language itself, as his analogised “net of language” becomes increasingly knotted and convoluted. And perhaps what may be gathered as a corollary of this theory is that our command and use of language is important in ways far more significant than how effectively we are able to communicate with others; it also determines and restricts how well we are able to describe, to comprehend and understand the world to and for ourselves. If this really is so, then what happens when one’s command of language truly begins to deteriorate, when the pieces of rope that constitute the net itself begin to fray and fall away—does this mean that one’s understanding and knowledge of the world is correspondingly diminished? When the shape and sound of familiar words become the only things well-defined about them, and the reins of long sentences slip impetuously from the grasp of my pen, the world becomes a little more inscrutable, each book a little more unfathomable, and my mood far bleaker.

Road rash

He did not remember how well he knew the place until his feet adopted a familiar tread, an almost youthful gait that he took a moment to recognise; along this particular stretch of road his feet forgot that they were clad in sturdy business shoes and not the worn, tatty sneakers that had long since disappeared, but which his feet remembered fondly in feel and form and fit. It was that junction again, with its streaking headlights and streaming exhaust hurtling in perpetual counterflow, the growling of intentions poised in cross-purposes across a ten-metre square of intersection that buzzed with tension and expectation. He had long memorised these details, but as the last synapses of recollection congealed in his mind, something else washed up from the cluttered sea of his memory — and what coagulated around these minutiae was not a hollow, echoing continental despair, but merely a terrible and utterly impervious anguish that had hardened and ossified like a scab around a bloody eye. He saw once again what the place had really meant to him, what the rules of the little red man who governed this crossing of paths made possible: it was the pocket of time that the junction created, a bubble of opportunity given an impeccable alias but which never was long enough for him to muster the courage to exploit, not even with a fleeting wave or a tentative greeting, before the green man burst into brilliance to wave time on its way, and the traffic exploded into motion and barrelled past him with the full bellow and bluster and violence of life.

"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"

"If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake.

And just the same if someone says that he is at this moment sitting at a table and writing. But even if in such cases I can’t be mistaken, isn’t it possible that I am drugged?”

If I am and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming.

Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining", while it was in fact raining.

Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain."

- Wittgenstein, MS177

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." Tractatus, 6.431

Passing time

Something that I sense very acutely nowadays is the passage of time, the unbearable subterranean creep of the hour or the desperation of seconds flinging themselves off a ticking watch. There's something about being ill that tinges everything with a hint of unreality, like the ripple of noumena hidden beneath the surfaces of objects; things pass in slow motion through the fog of fever, and the structure of each hour melts into the slide of seconds across the glowing tangent of twilight through my window.

When we read it is so difficult to tell what is right and what is wrong, but sometimes when we hit upon words that seem to explain an enduring truth, perhaps time itself slows and stops at the borders of these pages.

Opportunity

It disheartens me somewhat when people of obvious ability and the maturity to couple that aptitude with due diligence and humility fail to get what they so clearly deserve, and their merit is unaccountably unseen and passed over. Globalisation has thrown the gates of opportunity wide open, and it is the responsibility of those gatekeepers to cast a percipient eye over the hopeful multitude that waves anxiously and shouts ambitiously at each opening of opportunity, and pick out the hand that holds a qualification which speaks of real quality, amidst a sea of certificates.

True meritocracy—the culture of fostering an elite without the taint of elitism—must be regarded not only as the key to individual betterment, but also the cornerstone of societal advancement, and a fertile intellect not afforded the best conditions to flourish and heighten inevitably impedes the overall growth of the social establishment. What was missing in the archaic and anachronistic aristocratic ages was opportunity; what globalisation makes possible today is also opportunity; and what we owe the aspirants of tomorrow is again—opportunity.

Over the hill

As the days march unremittingly toward that two-decade signpost only a couple of months from now, my eerily creaking bones suggest that perhaps it's time for a change in outlook and mindset for what lies beyond the white fences of adolescence; some recent experiences I've had tell me that I need new perspectives for direction, and that the hills past that signpost go unpredictably up and down. What I've read about in books ostensibly exists in colours beyond those pages of black and white, and the culture of academia is often too quixotic for a world not satisfied with hypotheses and best-fit curves, that has little patience for lengthy arguments or esoteric trivia, and which seldom comes equipped with rounded corners, safety harnesses or security features.

Half-full is the same as half-empty, and vice versa; the important thing is finding water to fill up those glasses.

Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
____________
T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden...
________________

It's late and I have to go soon, but something's not packed: I know I haven't forgotten anything at all, on the contrary; I'm missing someone.

Perlman

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

-Victor Hugo

_____________

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

- Bertrand Russell

when flowers gaze at you

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth
_________________

Sometimes I lie down in my room, watching how old things lean in familiar ways—the stack of years built in birthday cards, the shelves of gifts sagging with sentiment, the different phases of faces mapped out in yearbooks, the faces of different phases caught in photo frames, greetings and farewells and apologies pressed between pages—and I think about the things that never had time to settle in, of relationships that never died but merely grew dormant, and feel the edges of the past curling in as the future unfurls itself.

Things and thoughts

Things and thoughts have been rushing by too quickly these days for me to plaster words over them, to cement them into the permanence of prose; life has been a breathless string of conversations and commotions, the kind of semi-confusion that barges in from all quarters when the future shakes you by the hand as the past taps on your shoulder, the strange meetings with people you know but don't really like, and those you like but don't really know—that sort of January where the new year comes tumbling noisily through the door and you stand by the side waiting for things to compose themselves, for the talking to cease and the dust to settle.

Romeo and Juliet

Act II, Scene VI
_____________

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Anna Karenina

from Part 8, Chapter 13
by Leo Tolstoy
_______________

"Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?

"Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and living on these blessings, like the children I did not understand them, and destroy, want to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than children when their mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.

"Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing taught by the church.

"The church? The church!" Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on the other side, and, leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.

"But can I believe in all the Church teaches?" he thought, trying himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the Church which had always seemed most strange and had always been a stumbling block to him.

"The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The Atonement?..."

"But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been told to me and all men."

And it seemed to him now that there was not a single article of faith of the Church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.

Under every article of faith of the Church could be put the faith in the service of truth instead of one's desires. And each doctrine did not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made it possible for each man, and millions of different sorts of men, wise men and imbeciles, old men and children—all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings—to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and which alone is precious to us.

Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. "Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a rounded vault? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it as not round and infinite, and, in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a firm blue vault, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it."

Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him.

"Can this be faith?' he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness. "My God, I thank Thee!" he said, gulping down his sobs and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.

Tonight

The best place to reflect on things is in the back of a taxi in some distant hour of the night, waiting for time to lengthen and distance to contract, for the miles to be consumed by minutes, and considering how old familiarities echo and reverberate noisily down the converging hallways of shared histories.

It is strange how things you have always wanted to hear can be implied in words you never wanted said. For sheer coincidence, blind circumstance, inconceivable chance and a strange coalescence; for conspicuous contradictions and concealed concurrences; for the mad moments, for the long conversations and the lengthier goodbyes; for the sheer lateness of the hour—the night has never been darker, nor the stars as bright, tonight.

For last year and the next

When the day breaks over the river ford where Jacob has been wrestling through the night, his adversary dislocates Jacob’s leg with a strange touch in the hollow of his thigh, leaving him clinging to the other man in sudden weakness. The long tussle in the dark ends not with Jacob in a position of rivalrous dominance, but in the pose of reliance and supplication. It is not an unfamiliar situation for Jacob, who was born clutching at Esau’s ankle as they emerged from their mother’s womb as if in an effort to be first-born, who found deceit to be the only method to gain his father’s blessing, and who was consequently hounded to desperation by a powerful brother who swore to kill him. The story of Jacob is the tale of a man grappling interminably with the ineffectual strength of his mortal arms against the implacable fate of second-place.

The struggle of Jacob with the unidentifiable man in the dark is a mutual exertion; the man struggles also with Jacob in the intimacy of wrestlers, two bodies in the image of each other clashing indistinguishably by night. Implicit in the conflict was the closeness of the two combatants; the sole means of victory was not to let go of the other. When the day broke and the wrestle came to an end, the man conceded victory to Jacob, not for the strength of Jacob’s arms, but for the vigour of his will and his fervent resolve not to let go of his foe until he had blessed him. In the pose of supplication, Jacob became victor in the pronouncement of God: “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” Israel, or “the one who strives with God”, refers to a struggle where victory lies not in glorious conquest but in persistence itself, and where triumph is received not in a stance of dominance but in the posture of a prayer.

In 2008, a year of few alternatives, I’ve nonetheless had many experiences, not all of them positive or meaningful, but some of them truly revelational. Thanks of course to my family, which has so often been the quintessence of persistence. I’m also profoundly grateful to the people who haven’t changed in the ways that matter most to me, despite the time passed and the distance gathered, who nonetheless know in silence the words I leave unshared.