dougvk

“During the day you will approach the frog several times and will utter words of worship. And you will ask it to work the miracles you wish.... Meanwhile you will cut a cross on which to sacrifice it. —From a ritual of Aleister Crowley”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“And from this springs the extraordinary question: Did the Egyptians know about electricity?”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?”
― Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story