Eric Linder > Recent Status Updates

Return to the introduction of B&T and this commentary after finishing.

Onto division 2..

“Men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the savage, crying incongruity and ghastliness of our condition suddenly reveals itself vivid before our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. Then the ground glides from under our feet.

But not for long. The horror of the sensation of groundlessness quickly brings man to himself. He must forget everything,”

* Return to aphorism 12

“The business of philosophy ups to teach man to live in uncertainty — man who is supremely afraid of uncertainty, and who is forever hiding himself behind this or the other dogma. More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.”

“We guessed and understood that this was a new
life and Dad was a different type of Dad now and we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what had
happened I don’t know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this:

Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event this?”

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

“My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time”

“I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive,”

“One need never leave
the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes-I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

I never know if I like poetry. Although if I do, it’s poems like some of these, which feel like quick scribblings on scrap paper, like a mechanism for how Cope processes life. There are poems (as usual) about objectively (?) beautiful observations that I find incredibly boring like a “dragonfly
landing on the old white boat” but perhaps I’m still waiting to experience a “day” as being “so still.”

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. …(two more lines)

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Les Etiquettes jaunes

I picked up a leaf
today from the sidewalk.
This seems childish.

Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!

You are too relaxed
to answer me. I am too
frightened to insist.

Leaf! don’t be neurotic
like the small chameleon.

the art of drowning

wouldn't you hope for a more leisurely review...

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?

Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model paragraph?

Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?

Your whole existence going off in your face

in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography -

“Then I faced forward and tried to stare into my own eyes, which I found staring back at me. Mottled with shadows, my face stared back at me with the most uncertain expression. If only those parted lips would tell me something, I knew that I would listen to them, whatever they might have to say, but no matter how I waited, no words came from anywhere.”

“Adults tease him better, almost a form of kindness. The boys just rip and rip at each other, endless patterns of attack and response..”

“The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can.

So you play a dumb version of yourself, he said. Are you suffering any less?”

..

“But you, I said, you suffer more because you insist on being bright and sharp.

I suffer more because you want to do what the world does, to dim the bright and to blunt the sharp.”

This book is a whirlwind. I’m very grateful to Andrea Oppo for gifting me a copy to read and I am unpacking Shestov’s thought slowly… Shestov is so peculiar and unorthodox, every time I pick up my pen to actively recall and summarize the last five pages I just read, I imagine him wincing, impatiently waiting to explain his philosophy to me again and again.

Some great tools and frameworks. Almost 4 stars because the author is so sincere. When productivity is pushed to the extreme, any potential for life to be lived with a sense of play (fun and joy), power (feeling empowered and confident), and meaningful relationships (people) are drained out because our cups are too full.

Shestov was, in his own words, making his last attempt to put “time” back
on its right track in this work, seeing the “laws of the world” as still intact and
traditional morality as still valid. It was the Nietzschean transvaluation of all
values that would soon radically modify his previous
notions.

“He felt deeply the fallacy of ideals and disenchantment of
time: in fact, he borrowed Shakespeare’s words “The time is out of joint” as
his lifelong motto, as if something were irreparably broken within the laws of
nature and morality, and nobody could ever fix it. From then on, the only prob-
lem for Shestov would be how to deal with this irreversible and unsolvable fact.”