Thoughts that shook my world

Thoughts that shook my world:

Love:

When I was younger and that means not too long ago, I had this stupid narcissistic thought that I didn’t have to make myself lovable for you to love me since if I had to do that, then your love was too cheap, too conditional. I was naively expecting you to be a Jesus or a Buddha or a man with a big heart. I forgot that you were only a common, ordinary, pedestrian, nasty, short, little man. Now I recognized the error of my infantile mode of thinking. Although love is not a business deal, it is still an arrangement. Every arrangement has its own terms and its own kind of currency. And in love the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values and their virtues, which they have achieved in their own character. You don’t love causelessly. You don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it. The man who loves everybody is the man who loves nobody. He is a liar or a saint.

So, if a man is nasty, stingy, and not loveable, he certainly does not deserve love. Perhaps he deserves our pity or scorn, even contempt. But wait a minute, he certainly does have free will. And if he wants love bad enough, he should correct his flaws, and then he may deserve our love. But he cannot expect the unearned---neither in love nor in money, neither in spirit nor in matter. Love is like respect, we have to earn it the hard way and that means we have to keep making ourselves loveable 24/7.

History:

A man who does not know history would not understand the present and is ill-prepared for the future. History is a valuable subject, but Aristotle said that fiction is more important then history, because while history presents things as they are, fiction presents them as they might be and ought to be. History is unfolding right in front of our eyes. All we have to do is to open our eyes, and not to willfully keep them closed: the decline of the U.S., the relentless rise of China, the tragic and comic and banal drama of the domination of the Palestinians by the Jews while the world turns their back on the drama, the radicalization of Islam, the increasing irrelevance of European powers, the emergence of India and Brazil, and the slow but inexorable disappearance of Vietnam as a sovereign state because of the apathy and indifference and silence and fear of its actual and potential leaders, and because of the orgy of the masses in sensuality and materialism which results from the breakdown of morality. Certainly there are some individuals in society who exhibit concern and care for the impending collapse of Vietnam, but these individuals are few and their voices are weak and not coordinated. More ominously, if they raise their voices loud enough, they will be thrown into jail by the ruling authorities who are selfish and rotten to the core, who are only concerned with their own selfish interests

Music:

In Rachmaninoff, there is an enormous, heroic sense of life. He projects that life is a difficult struggle, but that man will ultimately win. Man is not defeated, as in Beethoven’s music.

Humor and incongruity and absurdity:

Every instance of humor involves the denial of a certain view of reality, and implies that there is correct view. You laugh at a certain man or event, because it represents something contradictory and therefore incorrect. But when moderns begin to laugh at the universe as such, the absurdity in their position is that they are laughing without any point of reference. You can laugh at certain things within the universe. You cannot laugh at the universe as a whole, because if everything is incongruous, there can be no such thing as incongruity itself---and there is no ground for humor. Everything cannot be absurd. It is only by reference to something non-absurd that we can judge certain actions, people or events as absurd.

“What is the purpose of life?”

Everybody is dropping dead, left and right. You get up in the morning, go to the computer, and there it is: In your email inbox is another announcement that somebody has kicked the bucket. You can’t help thinking “What is the purpose/meaning of life?” But the question itself is improper. It smuggles in the wrong answer. The question should be: “What is the purpose of my life, of any particular individual’s life?” To ask: “What is the purpose of life?” implies that somebody outside of ourselves---some supernatural being---has to prescribe that purpose, and that we should spend our lives trying to discover it and live up to it. There is no such thing as “the purpose of life,” because life is an end in itself. Life is the purpose of life. And nature has given us a very good way of knowing whether we are spending our lives properly or not---namely, whether we are happy or not.
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You wrote and copied the above and were tempted to disseminate to the world, but you controlled yourself. After a good night’s sleep, you don’t give a fuck about the world. You don’t give a shit about the world. So, you confined this piece to that museum called blog. Your alienation is getting worse, but you are getting stronger.