He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfillment in such roundabout and often terrible ways.

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr

Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.


Mike Tyson, as quoted by Avishai Margalit in the NYRB.

For Kevin

Death wipes everything away
Except for the living.
We are each a world.
And all there will ever be.


Caught in the ether.  

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

Michel de Montaigne 

Natural Teleology

Natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately conscious, organisms.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos


See also:  http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2018/01/if-there-was-cosmological-design-what.html
 

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.... A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. 

Philip Larkin, The Old Fools

Now is now!  There is never more to experience than this single "now", which recurs at an interval exactly one second in length.

Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth


 See also:   http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2013/09/moments-in-time-and-consciousness.html

What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?...

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                   A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                   Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

No one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it.... We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go.

Michel de Montaigne

All of our memories are subjective.... The loss of pleasure and pain is a loss of subjectivity, of an ability to relate to objects, to persons, and to oneself.... All of our memories are subjective—they are created from the point of view of the individual who is remembering.

Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff,  The New York Review, August 17.2017

The same sun shines on everyone and everything, each place is as real as the next.


From an afternoon in Swaziland

Oh, if and, if and when you get into the end zone
Act like you've been there a thousand times before

The Tragically Hip, Heaven is a Better Place

As we move up our space/time-line, what will be has been, what has been remains, now is just now.

An errant thought.

Creatures of a day, what is anyone?  What is he not?  Man is but a dream of a shadow.  Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rest upon men a radiant light.

Pindar, Odes for Victorious Athletes

A life is like a garden.  Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.
Live long and prosper.

Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet

It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck on top of it, bivouacked above the tree line, free, but freezing, with no way forward.

Tim Parks, The New Yorker (Reverend)

My moment-by-moment happiness is pretty low, but my life satisfaction is great.

From The New York Review of Dec 4, 2014.