Luck is probability taken personally

"Luck is probability taken personally", Chip Denman

tempest quotes

Bob Dylan's new album 'Tempest' resulted in my stumbling across a few The Tempest quotes....

• “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” 
• “What's past is prologue.” 
• “Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone.”

random quote - woody allen

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon

thought : happiness writes white

Encountered in latest Martin Amis, book, but not from him....but a poignant thought - "Happiness writes white"....there is no need, nor tools, to record the good times properly...

Though, if writing is a drive for immortality, to 'remember the me that was' - then how crushingly tragic if the very moments worth living for, are the ones that aren't written down...

And they lived happily ever after....  what more do we really need to know?

random poem : Ambulences, Philip Larkin

Ambulances


Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

Amis on mortality

• "Your wonder of life increases towards the end because it is tinged with a leave-taking feeling that it's not going to be there for very much longer."
• [past becomes like an Empire....when there's more happened then to come] (paraphrase)
• Bullet train of midlife : "days drag by, and years fall away like leaves"

Martin Amis 

Seneca on this vale of tears

"What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears."

Terror Management Theory and God shaped holes

How awareness of our mortality may be a major driver of civilization
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climbing-mount-immortality&print=true
I particularly like the concept of "Terror Management Theory - awareness of one's mortality focuses the mind to create and produce to avoid the terror that comes from confronting the mortality paradox that would otherwise, in the words of the theory's proponents psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, reduce people to 'twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to the demands of their immediate surroundings.'"

This reminds me of the quote from Salmon Rushdie  about us all having a God shaped hole inside us which we are constantly trying to fill, and that art, creation, suggests itself to us for this purpose : "I, too, possess the same God-shaped hole. Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature"
 
When googling this, I found a follow up quote from Rushdie which is also worth repeating : "I used to say: "there is a God-shaped hole in me." For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important."

Aristotle, marriage, and the balanced life

Have always found it hard to nail the philosophers down on marriage (not a lot to say, or wise enough to keep their mouths shut!) but a friend getting married reminded me of the topic, and I really must look into it again. Especially I must revisit Aristotle, since , whether by cultural default or reasoned choice,  I have a lot of time for him, and especially like (what I understand to be) his conception of the balanced life, involving family and children.

After Plato's excessive abstraction and airiness, Aristotle I think provided a wonderfully pragmatic foundation for Western civilization, as beautifully depicted in Raphael's "School Of Athens" which shows Plato gesticulating to the sky, while Aristotle points firmly back down to earth. While we must examine and question life, there is no point in wandering about with our head in the clouds. Life is about real things, real commitments and enterprises, not abstract wondering, and marriage, family, settling down, is somehow part of that reality for the social animal that is man.

 
                                        

What I also intuit from him (but need to confirm this) is the idea that via these things there is one of the roads to happiness, whereby one gains happiness not by striving for it itself, but by seeking it for others. As he says in the Nichnomachean Ethics, the essence of love "seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved".  Given our willful and whimsical nature, how we habituate and how desire begets satisfaction, begets desire, then there is something in this. This I think is complemented by the Aristotelian idea of such things a happiness etc. as actitivites rather than states : to be happy is to act in such a way, not to achieve a state, and to experience love, is to love, not to be loved.  And that is what a family offers - the opportunity to love by choice, not through duty or default, others, one's wife/husband, and children; to work for their benefit at the (at least partial) cost of one's own. And of course, it's nice the way evolution provides the innate drive to gain satisfaction from that as well, but one that doesn't habituate.

"In being loved, on the other hand, people delight for its own sake; whence it would seem to be better than being honoured, and friendship to be desirable in itself. But it seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving; for some mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return (if they cannot have both), but seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering; and they themselves love their children even if these owing to their ignorance give them nothing of a mother's due. Now since friendship depends more on loving, and it is those who love their friends that are praised, loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends, so that it is only those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends, and only their friendship that endures."
Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII

Quote of the day : Vanishing lives...

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.”
― Paul Auster