Thursday, March 07, 2024

Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape. And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand. And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words. In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.
by (https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/21/kahlil-gibran-prophet-talking)

Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Translated by Borges himself, Bloy writes

[St. Paul’s famous cryptic statement Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate] would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived “in a mirror.” We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart… If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.
by (https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/06/10/the-mirror-of-enigmas-borges-bloy and https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/02/16/thomas-wright-original-theory/)

Monday, October 31, 2022

On Children by Khalil Gibran

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said "Speak to us of children" Your children are not your children They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself They come through you but not from you And though they are with you yet they belong not to you You may give them your love but not your thoughts For they have their own thoughts You may house their bodies but not their souls For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams You may strive to be like them But seek not to make them like you For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday You are the bows from which your children As living arrows are sent forth The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite And he bends you with his might That his arrows may go swift and far Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness For even as he loves the arrow that flies So he loves also the bow that is stable..

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

The Geometry Of Grief

“The distance between here and there is the answer to the wrong question.”
... is also the way to view and live through grief — an exercise in continual dilation of perspective, so that life can be seen from more and more angles besides the acuteness of loss, noticing more and more of what is there, what remains and what grows in the wake of the lost; an exercise in remembering, again and again, that healing is subtle and unpredictable, unfolding in tiny, quiet, immeasurable increments that eventually add up to profound changes of measurable difference.
Small changes may not cause large differences, but small changes, invisible because of our inability to measure exactly, can mask our ability to predict whether, when, and where large differences can occur. Chaos is about the breakdown of our ability to forecast for more than a short time.
by (https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/11/10/geometry-of-grief-michael-frame/)

Sunday, September 26, 2021

How to be anxious by David Egan

Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger all think we have a strong motive to flee anxiety when it strikes us. Our freedom entails a heavy burden of individual responsibility, which is daunting. Much easier, then, to act as if the big questions of how to live and how to make sense of things were already settled.
by (https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-anxious-like-kierkegaard-sartre-and-heidegger)

Monday, June 21, 2021

Kierkegaard on our greatest source of unhappiness — and its antidote

The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.
by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/05/kierkegaard-on-presence-unhappiness)

Wednesday, April 07, 2021

Hannah Arendt on Love

Fearlessness is what love seeks... Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future…
by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/02/25/love-and-saint-augustine-hannah-arendt/) Illustration by Maurice Sendak from I’ll Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss.
Also https://aeon.co/videos/whats-essential-is-i-must-understand-a-rare-candid-interview-with-hannah-arendt

Alan Watts on Freedom

The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.
by (https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/16/alan-watts-freedom-fear-love/) Art by Thomas Wright from his Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750.