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