Luger or Pipe?
March 10, 2020
Watched “The Hours” which focuses on the Virginia Woolf novel “Mrs. Dalloway. Good story (duh – about Woolf!), good acting.
My friend Bob died March 4. World War ii vet, participated in the Battle of the Bulge. Prisoner of War. He told me once of still seeing very clearly in his mind’s eye ripples in puddles caused by shrapnel falling from artillery shells bursting in the trees overhead. He also told of a German paratrooper who was killed (no discussion of who shot him) in the air and Bob and an officer both racing to the body. The Officer got the Luger and Bob got the guy’s pipe. When he finished this story, he added that he had never shared it with anyone.
Perhaps he told others before he passed but there was a relatively short time frame and I’ve always wondered what happened to the American officer and his Luger. It is possible that only Bob lived through the war and knew the story of the German’s death and then shared it with me. It seemed ironic, as I considered this, that I was privy to details that the dead soldier’s family did not know.
At this time, collectors project the value of a WWII Luger at $35, 000 to $1,000,000 – the pipe? not so much.
Memorial
March 13, 2020
We went to a memorial service today. I am saddened by the lives that we all leave behind us and the pitiful attempts we make at finding meaning in our time on earth. Sometimes, I think it would be better to have some pagan celebration rather than singing a few old clichèd hymns. I fear that God does not hear our prayers at all and while my heart yearns for true goodness and purity, I take no comforts in the old rituals. If God has any mercy on me, let it be for my lifelong and steadfast search for him even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is only the invention of a mind wishing for a soul.
We elected to pass on communion which is apparently routine in this denomination. I might have passed even without the virus – such is the state of my faith these days – a faith that says, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.” If God exists, neither he nor the unfeeling universe cares. We are orphans shipwrecked on this shore awaiting the end. We may fill the time with happy myths but it does not change the end of the story.
Travel and Philosophy
March 14, 2020
We went to some estate sales today. Numbers were down a little. The State Department just included the UK and Ireland in the travel ban so I guess all those scheduled for the Scotland trip will lose all their money! At least we will have the summer to see how things progress as we get closer to our own trip to Ireland. There is the possibility that the pandemic will diminish over the summer and strengthen in the fall.
I bought three books today. While thinking about philosophy these past few days I determined that philosophy should have a more direct relationship to the common man and that it is the increasingly fine and complex arguments of the philosophers that make philosophy irrelevant for the masses. I thought that Nietzsche,, in the main, is not even a philosopher according to the current definition. He has created no “system” of thought – no rigid perspective that he forces us to use to view life. One of my books supported this thinking – saying, in effect, that Nietzsche conducted his own life as an experiment to show how man could live outside the boundaries of ancient belief systems. I had also been thinking that philosophy’s grand task is to answer three questions:
- How did we get here?
- What is our (daily) purpose?
- What is our (civilizational) goal?
The other book, “The Story of Mankind,” lays out those exact questions in the first pages. There we have the first goal of philosophy – to answer these questions before becoming lost in arcane, inscrutable anfractuosities.
The philosopher also has an obligation to recognize the innocents around him or her and to do no harm to those who are dedicated to their beliefs. The philosopher should rise above superiority and recognize that questioning does not necessarily require discard of all. Truth does still exist and God does still abide in men and women of good will and he certainly knows his own ineluctable truths. It is our job to find them among the products of the heavenly mills. God may be dead but we live among his memories and it is no crime to revere the virtues that we learned at his knee. We are young and it is characteristic of youth to over-react and eliminate everything when the wise would keep the best and most valuable .
9:57pm
Let us propose a 3-D map of the known universe. This map will change with time. It will begin with our big bang 13 billion years ago and will proceed into the future for another trillion billion years. Every time a life form develops on a planet, its sun will light up with a yellow light and if that life form achieves self-awareness and consciousness enough to record its own history, that sun will light up with a green light. The time we’ve marked off will be compressed into about 10 minutes so we can see the birth of life and the rise of empires across space and time.
What do you imagine that light show would look like?
“in my father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” Christ spoke these words in John 14:2
We see the physical universe. The distances and times are incomprehensible to us. Perhaps there is more. We see and do not understand – what about the unseen?
Lockdown and Flameout
March 16, 2020
Restaurants, day cares, stores, all closing and now they’re saying we could be in this shape until late summer. The southern hemisphere is enjoying summer now and they are still seeing the spread of the virus so it appears that warmer weather is not going to slow it down.
When the last echoes of the humans fade in the far reaches of the universe and the last signal and sign of our existence is lost, no one will remember the ill-fated apes that rose to consciousness or shed a tear over their demise. Then will the darkness rest in silence until the eternal recurrence rears its simian head again and the howling returns to the jungle trees.
Virus versus Economy
March 18, 2020
Some studies now suggest that our tactics in fighting the virus may only prolong the inevitable and while we certainly should try to flatten the curve, the strategy should focus on those most likely to use critical care rather than on the demographics that will be relatively unaffected. The economic fallout is also a big question…. yes, it is important to limit the effects but if the entire economy is put at risk, could it be that we create a bigger crisis than if we had done nothing at all?
My own daily sense of alienation is exacerbated by all this even though our routine is little changed. I am more and more incredulous at my awareness of consciousness…. I’m amazed that creatures like us exist at all, that we move though this physical world and contemplate our own existence. I can barely hold on.
11:54am
We just walked two miles.
Here is a quote from Thomas Merton:
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.” – Thomas Merton
I predict that within a week, they will shift from this total isolation model and will put more emphasis on protecting those who are most likely to overwhelm the health care system. Why should the economy collapse while so many are unaffected? Doctors who have the virus say they would normally work through such mild symptoms.
Shared Oblivion
March 19, 2020
The first day of spring dawned cloudy; a very fine mist fell as we completed our 2-mile walk this morning. More bad news out of Italy as their deaths approach China’s. Stocks down about 8,000 points and many retail outlets are closed or operating on reduced hours. This will kill many small businesses and the entire world is getting an unaccustomed objective look in the mirror. Many will emerge from this with a different perspective on life, the truth of our existence, the role of hope, the reality of despair, and the nature of God in crisis.
The sentient await their epiphany
The unknowing wander their dark cloud
They race together to a common fate
And in the end, arrive at their shared oblivion.
Self as Figment
March 23, 2020 10:47pm
Today I cut some brush from under the cedar tree in the back near the pond. We think of our surroundings, the terrain, as static, unchanging but look at a map of continental drift since the creation and you see that momentous changes occur but our short lives and the entire life of man is so limited that we see nothing of reality. We see so little but we have such certain opinions as we wallow in our ignorance.
The self, too, is a figment, a frail sad figment of imagination constructed of cards and all bult on a platform of many sections all lashed together with the gossamer threads of wishes, dreams, and myths. And this platform – the perceptions of God and life and love and time and culture and the earth and the stars – it is lashed so weakly together and it floats upon deeper understandings of which we are barely aware even in our most perceptive moments and this medium supporting the platform, it is disturbed by a small, smooth stone causing ripples that break the bonds of the platform and bring the house of cards down and they cannot be rebuilt. And that is what this corona virus is doing to some people right now and they will never be the same. What of a bigger stone?
Language – please!
March 26, 2020 12:27 am
Just started War and Peace after finishing Madame Bovary. Spent the morning putting up security cameras in a place where they make tee shirts…..thousands of them. While there, I listened to the workers talking. You can guess the demographics but what I’m about to describe is endemic in our culture. “Fucking” and/or “motherfucker” was in EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE. I kid you not. This is the language of many, many Americans. I wonder if they know how this sounds….I mean these folks are not exactly speaking in sentences that rival Proust so I estimate that fully 10% of all words they speak is some variation of “fuck”. Their total vocabulary is probably less than a few hundred words: you know: tattoo, hamburger, fuck, joint, jail, motherfucker, sex, McDonalds, porn, bet, fucker, fart, hungry, screw, wrestling, ring, tee shirt, fucking, bitch….you get the point. Don’t we have public education in this country?
This is the difference between wisdom and ignorance. I have known some very uneducated people who were paragons of virtue and examples of the very best that men and women can be. I suppose some of it is how they were raised and the expectations placed on them. If you want to be taken seriously, there is no need for profanity.
Ubermensch
March 28, 2020
Watching a Netflix series on Freud – mostly fictional but thought -provoking and entertaining. I was thinking today about Nietzsche and the Ubermensch….if you believe God is dead and you propose to determine your own morality, is this just a license for spiritual anarchy? Would any of the Ubermensch elect to live a more rigorous life or would all drown in licentiousness?
Can we even imagine a world in which everyone truly lived a life of caring and self-sacrifice – even if it were outside the framework of a “religion”?
We mowed the grass today for the first time and I have declared my brush-cutting over for the season. Next is to prepare the garden. Thunder and lightning outside now at 11:01pm.
Corona: confirmed 663,828. Dead 30,822 worldwide.
Government Inefficiency and Maximilian Kolbe
March 30, 2020
How do you spend BILLIONS of dollars for government agencies that don’t seem to be prepared for a national emergency that we KNEW would strike us at some point? Read about all the possible extinction-level-events that could occur and every list will include “pandemic.” Yet here we are with little basic information about how to combat corona virus. Today, the discussion is whether we all should have been wearing masks from the outset! I’m sorry, we have known about viruses and their transmission for a long time and we’re still debating this simple prophylactic measure? Unbelievable! If there was any question, why didn’t a team of researchers go to the hotspots early on and get some answers? Why even have a government?
Just got an email about some members of a group to which I belong who are pastors of a church in N.C. They ask for prayers since their church will be suspending all activities until April 15, 2020.
I don’t want to sound negative but I don’t think that prayer will help much. Religion and spirituality help keep hope alive and that is important for the people who don’t delve too deeply but if you understand the futility of hope it seems rather childish. Christ stood against nihilism but we can’t change our fate, we can only accept or resist. In the end, neither course makes any difference. No, I don’t believe that – one at least has some possibility of making life a little more bearable while we wait and it is for that reason that I am a supporter of that most universal of philosophical positions – religion.
Quote from Maximilian Kolbe:
“No one in the world can change truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depths of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves.” Maximilian Kolbe