May you find something to help you on your journey.
I bargained with Life for a penny,
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening when
I counted my scanty store.
For Life is a just employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.
by J.B. Rittenhouse
Author: Sandor Katz
Rating: 5/5
Last Read: September 2018
Who Should Read: Cooks, experimenters, and those interested in traditional food practices from around the world
Reading Deep Nutrition reinvigorated my interest in fermentation. I kept a sourdough starter alive for many years, but never branched out much beyond making my own bread. My starter died during one of my frequent trips to China while working at Apple, and I let the venture rest for a few years.
I searched around to find books about fermentation and came across the work of Sandor Katz. I started with The Art of Fermentation, his survey of fermentation techniques from around the world, rather than Wild Fermentation, his book of recipes.
If you are a creative cook or an experimentalist,The Art of Fermentation is definitely the place to start. Rather than provide recipes and proscriptions, Katz shares methods, guidelines, and inspiration. The central theme of the book is essentially, “you can’t go wrong” and “it’s all fine”. Got some mold on top of your vegetable ferment? Scrape it off, remove discolored layers, and keep going. Don’t like salty pickles? Scale it back. Ferment whatever vegetables you like. Mix and match flavors. Try new approaches and flavor combinations – the worst thing that could happen is some of your pickles are destined for the compost pile. Katz’s style is comforting and encouraging – it’s impossible to read the book without being inspired to start some fermentation experiments of your own.
Since reading The Art of Fermentation, we’ve been fermenting food on a regular basis. Every week I refresh two heirloom yogurt cultures (Bulgarian + Greek) and a cultured buttermilk. We have a beautiful German pickling crock on the counter which is kept full of Chinese pao cai. We finish breakfast and dinner with a small glass of beet kvass. I’ve always got a batch or two of sauerkraut in progress, along with other vegetable fermentation experiments: brussels sprouts, beet greens, carrot greens, cilantro stems, asparagus trimmings. My first batch of pickles for hot sauce is tucked away for the next three months. We have a home-style chili paste that tastes infinitely better than packaged pastes. Soon I’ll gather the courage to ferment my own fish sauce, which involves allowing whole fish with their organs intact to ferment and liquify over a few months.
The Art of Fermentation enabled me to be a more creative cook. And the best part of all is that it feels like I am always cooking while lovingly tending to my many projects.
“Between fresh and rotten, there is a creative space in which some of the most compelling flavors arise.”
I didn’t end up making the mind map as I normally would… But I did capture these notes.
This is one of the few physical books I’ve purchased in the past few years, so this is a smaller set of quotes than usual. The majority of the highlights below come from the introduction, as the rest of the book is focused on methods for fermentation.
“Is it possible that, rather than humans “discovering” alcohol and mastering its production, we evolved always already knowing it? Anthropologist Mikal John Ansvel (check name) points out that “all vertebrate species are equipped with a hepatic enzyme system with which to metabolize alcohol.” Many animals have been documented consuming alcohol in their natural habitats.
[Food storage] primarily consists of keeping foods dry but not too dry, cold but not too cold, and dark. But it is not easy, with limited technology, to create ideal conditions for storage.
What is fascinating about the concept of coevolution is the recognition that the processes of becoming are infinitely interconnected.
One of the most interesting points raised early on by Katz is that refrigeration can be viewed as a historical bubble:
We must safeguard the living legacy of traditional food preservation techniques.
Benefits of acid food fermentation:
Traditional preservation:
Botulism is primarily associated with canning – a new technique (19th century, developed in Napoleonic France).
Live cultures from lactic acid fermentation are only viable in foods kept @ < 115F/47C
Eat a variety of fermented foods, some with live cultures, and while you’re at it, eat a variety of plants. Make sure that at least some of the plants and bacteria are wild.
The range of plants and microbes under active cultivation is really quite limited. More different interactions – with varied phytochemical bacteria – and the compounds bacteria produce – stimulate us in functional ways. Diversity is its own reward.
“Between fresh and rotten, there is a creative space in which some of the most compelling flavors arise.”
If you are interested in purchasing this book, you can support the website by using our Amazon affiliate link.
Author: Albert Camus
Rating: 4/5
Last Read: August 2018
Who Should Read: Anyone interested in The Mind, philosophy, psychology, or religion
I’ve read a few of Camus’s essays, but The Fall was my first major foray into his work.
The Fall is a short novel. The book is presented as a confessional monologue given by a lawyer to a compatriot in a bar. The lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, recounts the events of his life which led to his fall from a fully-absorbed and selfish love of life to one of dark depression and guilt. Clamence’s evolution in The Fall seems to purposefully mirror the themes presented in the book of Genesis, where man is kicked out of the garden of Eden and Wakes Up to a world of work, pain, and knowledge of evil.
How does Clamence’s Fall occur? While walking through Paris one night, Clamence fails to save a woman whom (he assumes) is pushed into in the river and drowns. His inaction that night drives him further and further into madness and guilt. Camus seems to emphasize a point frequently repeated by Jordan Peterson throughout his biblical lecture series: Nobody gets away with anything, ever.
Clamence’s self-judgment leads him down the road to an existential nightmare. He’s quite an interesting and disturbing character, especially for someone so introspective. He posits that we can never improve ourselves, because our own consciences will eternally condemn us as guilty. This is an amusing stance for a character who admits that he is morally bankrupt, but continues to act the same way that he did before “The Fall”. He seems to think that his admission of guilt and cowardice makes him noble, or at least no longer a hypocritical liar. Even after the self-torment, he says that given a second chance to save the woman, he knows that he would still fail to act.
It is this final admission of Clamence’s that leaves me the most disturbed – his attitude feels evil and sickening to me. Perhaps I find myself so disturbed because this attitude is more common than I would like to think.
If you are a student of the human condition, The Fall is a book for you. This novel is extremely philosophical and touches on many points which are still relevant in our society today. Perhaps the points discussed in the novel have always been relevant to humanity. I’m still chewing on many internal questions and uncomfortable Truths raised by this book.
This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
I could readily understand why sermons, decisive preachings, and fire miracles took place on accessible heights. In my opinion no one meditated in cellars or prison cells (unless they were situated in a tower with a broad view); one just became moldy.
After all, living aloft is still the only way of being seen and hailed by the largest number.
Indeed, wasn’t that Eden, cher monsieur: no intermediary between life and me? Such was my life. I never had to learn how to live. In that regard, I already knew everything at birth. Some people’s problem is to protect themselves from men or at least to come to terms with them. In my case, the understanding was already established. Familiar when it was appropriate, silent when necessary, capable of a free and easy manner as readily as of dignity, I was always in harmony. Hence my popularity was great and my successes in society innumerable.
Yes, few creatures were more natural than I. I was altogether in harmony with life, fitting into it from top to bottom without rejecting any of its ironies, its grandeur, or its servitude. In particular the flesh, matter, the physical in short, which disconcerts or discourages so many men in love or in solitude, without enslaving me, brought me steady joys. I was made to have a body. Whence that harmony in me, that relaxed mastery that people felt, even to telling me sometimes that it helped them in life. Hence my company was in demand. Often, for instance, people thought they had met me before. Life, its creatures and its gifts, offered themselves to me, and I accepted such marks of homage with a kindly pride. To tell the truth, just from being so fully and simply a man, I looked upon myself as something of a superman.
Have you never suddenly needed understanding, help, friendship? Yes, of course. I have learned to be satisfied with understanding. It is found more readily and, besides, it’s not binding. “I beg you to believe in my sympathetic understanding” in the inner discourse always precedes immediately “and now, let’s turn to other matters.”
Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don’t think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful.
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!
But it’s not easy, for friendship is absent-minded or at least unavailing. It is incapable of achieving what it wants. Maybe, after all, it doesn’t want it enough? Maybe we don’t love life enough? Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives.
But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!
That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.
Death certainly has this affect on me:
Notice your neighbors if perchance a death takes place in the building. They were asleep in their little routine and suddenly, for example, the concierge dies. At once they awake, bestir themselves, get the details, commiserate. A newly dead man and the show begins at last. They need tragedy, don’t you know; it’s their little transcendence, their apéritif.
Camus isn’t pulling any punches, and he hits the nail on the head:
I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Life became less easy for me: when the body is sad the heart languishes.
Humans need slaves (or at least domination), Clamence says:
I am well aware that one can’t get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing—you agree with me? And even the most destitute manage to breathe. The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.
Still happening:
Power, on the other hand, settles everything. It took time, but we finally realized that. For instance, you must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: “This is the way I think. What are your objections?” We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué: “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”
To me, this seems to be how the rich currently think of the masses:
Just between us, slavery, preferably with a smile, is inevitable then. But we must not admit it. Isn’t it better that whoever cannot do without having slaves should call them free men? For the principle to begin with, and, secondly, not to drive them to despair. We owe them that compensation, don’t we? In that way, they will continue to smile and we shall maintain our good conscience.
I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in regard to all for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority—like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner—it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time for practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.
By gradual degrees I saw more clearly, I learned a little of what I knew. Until then I had always been aided by an extraordinary ability to forget. I used to forget everything, beginning with my resolutions. Fundamentally, nothing mattered.
Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate—for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
As I passed, the idiot greeted me with a “poor dope” that I still recall. A totally insignificant story, in your opinion? Probably. Still it took me some time to forget it, and that’s what counts.
I am guilty of this – the monkey mind at play.
As an afterthought I clearly saw what I should have done. I saw myself felling d’Artagnan with a good hook to the jaw, getting back into my car, pursuing the monkey who had struck me, overtaking him, jamming his machine against the curb, taking him aside, and giving him the licking he had fully deserved. With a few variants, I ran off this little film a hundred times in my imagination. But it was too late, and for several days I chewed a bitter resentment.
Is this how my own anger serves me – simply wanting to dominate and have others listen?
I had dreamed—this was now clear—of being a complete man who managed to make himself respected in his person as well as in his profession. Half Cerdan, half de Gaulle, if you will. In short, I wanted to dominate in all things. This is why I assumed the manner, made a particular point of displaying my physical skill rather than my intellectual gifts. But after having been struck in public without reacting, it was no longer possible for me to cherish that fine picture of myself. If I had been the friend of truth and intelligence I claimed to be, what would that episode have mattered to me? It was already forgotten by those who had witnessed it. I’d have barely accused myself of having got angry over nothing and also, having got angry, of not having managed to face up to the consequences of my anger, for want of presence of mind. Instead of that, I was eager to get my revenge, to strike and conquer. As if my true desire were not to be the most intelligent or most generous creature on earth, but only to beat anyone I wanted, to be the stronger, in short, and in the most elementary way.
The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone.
What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one’s mind one succeeds in dominating everyone?
Everyone has a shadow. Is yours properly integrated, or do you let it run free?
When I was threatened, I became not only a judge in turn but even more: an irascible master who wanted, regardless of all laws, to strike down the offender and get him on his knees. After that, mon cher compatriote, it is very hard to continue seriously believing one has a vocation for justice and is the predestined defender of the widow and orphan.
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Of course, true love is exceptional—two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
The mind’s scheming, exposed by Camus:
I had principles, to be sure, such as that the wife of a friend is sacred. But I simply ceased quite sincerely, a few days before, to feel any friendship for the husband.
Our feminine friends have in common with Bonaparte the belief that they can succeed where everyone else has failed.
How many people must this way:
I was never concerned with the major problems except in the intervals between my little excesses.
In short, for me to live happily it was essential for the creatures I chose not to live at all. They must receive their life, sporadically, only at my bidding.
How do I know I have no friends? It’s very easy: I discovered it the day I thought of killing myself to play a trick on them, to punish them, in a way. But punish whom? Some would be surprised, and no one would feel punished. I realized I had no friends. Besides, even if I had had, I shouldn’t be any better off. If I had been able to commit suicide and then see their reaction, why, then the game would have been worth the candle. But the earth is dark, cher ami, the coffin thick, and the shroud opaque.
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.
You think you are dying to punish your wife and actually you are freeing her. It’s better not to see that.
So what’s the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood—never!
I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgment is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune.
Today we are always ready to judge as we are to fornicate. With this difference, that there are no inadequacies to fear. If you doubt this, just listen to the table conversation during August in those summer hotels where our charitable fellow citizens take the boredom cure. If you still hesitate to conclude, read the writings of our great men of the moment. Or else observe your own family and you will be edified. Mon cher ami, let’s not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us! Otherwise, we’ll be left in shreds.
In short, the moment I grasped that there was something to judge in me, I realized that there was in them an irresistible vocation for judgment.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
As for me, the injustice was even greater: I was condemned for past successes.
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves. What do you expect? The idea that comes most naturally to man, as if from his very nature, is the idea of his innocence.
We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
You won’t delight a man by complimenting him on the efforts by which he has become intelligent or generous. On the other hand, he will beam if you admire his natural generosity. Inversely, if you tell a criminal that his crime is not due to his nature or his character but to unfortunate circumstances, he will be extravagantly grateful to you.
But those rascals want grace, that is irresponsibility, and they shamelessly allege the justifications of nature or the excuses of circumstances, even if they are contradictory. The essential thing is that they should be innocent, that their virtues, by grace of birth, should not be questioned and that their misdeeds, born of a momentary misfortune, should never be more than provisional.
As I told you, it’s a matter of dodging judgment. Since it is hard to dodge it, tricky to get one’s nature simultaneously admired and excused, they all strive to be rich. Why? Did you ever ask yourself? For power, of course. But especially because wealth shields from immediate judgment, takes you out of the subway crowd to enclose you in a chromium-plated automobile, isolates you in huge protected lawns, Pullmans, first-class cabins. Wealth, cher ami, is not quite acquittal, but reprieve, and that’s always worth taking.
Above all, don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. They merely hope you will encourage them in the good opinion they have of themselves by providing them with the additional assurance they will find in your promise of sincerity. How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It’s a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness. Therefore, if you are in that situation, don’t hesitate: promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can. You will satisfy their hidden desire and doubly prove your affection.
This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
Don’t smile; that truth is not so basic as it seems. What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.
However that may be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested means, everything I desired.
For instance, I never complained that my birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself. Several days before the famous date (which I knew very well) I was on the alert, eager to let nothing slip that might arouse the attention and memory of those on whose lapse I was counting (didn’t I once go so far as to contemplate falsifying a friend’s calendar?). Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.
I have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me—which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome. There are really efforts and convictions I have never been able to understand. I always looked with amazement, and a certain suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into despair over the loss of a “position,” or sacrificed themselves with a high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.
You remember the remark: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you!” Ah, the one who said that spoke words of wisdom!
Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life. I would measure the years separating me from my end. I would look for examples of men of my age who were already dead. And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was doing worth continuing?
You see, it is not enough to accuse yourself in order to clear yourself; otherwise, I’d be as innocent as a lamb. One must accuse oneself in a certain way, which it took me considerable time to perfect.
The greater the threat to the feeling in which I had hoped to find calm, the more I demanded that feeling of my partner.
I tried accordingly to give up women, in a certain way, and to live in a state of chastity. After all, their friendship ought to satisfy me. But this was tantamount to giving up gambling. Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and obviously I bored them too. No more gambling and no more theater—I was probably in the realm of truth. But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.
Despairing of love and of chastity, I at last bethought myself of debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality.
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
There is nothing frenzied about debauchery, contrary to what is thought. It is but a long sleep.
Physical jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time that it is a self-judgment.
Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
Hell is a real place, and I see people living there every day:
I’ll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
Say, do you know why he was crucified—the one you are perhaps thinking of at this moment? Well, there were heaps of reasons for that. There are always reasons for murdering a man. On the contrary, it is impossible to justify his living. That’s why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence only rarely. But, beside the reasons that have been very well explained to us for the past two thousand years, there was a major one for that terrible agony, and I don’t know why it has been so carefully hidden. The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. If he did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed others—even though he didn’t know which ones.
There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
In solitude and when fatigued, one is after all inclined to take oneself for a prophet.
You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne, no friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others’ judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.
However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.
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by Charles Bukowski
(Photograph by Mark Hanauer)
Either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you
when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.
I had bad blood, a twisted
mind, a precarious
upbringing.
I was hard as granite, I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.
I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted, jailed, in and
out of fights, in and out
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at, I had no male
friends,
I changed jobs and
cities, I hated holidays,
babies, history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.
peace and happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
and
addled
mind.
but as I went on with
my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passage through
any number of
women-it gradually
began to occur to
me
that I wasn’t different
from the
others, I was the same,
they were all fulsome
with hatred,
glossed over with petty
grievances,
the men I fought in
alleys had hearts of stone.
everybody was nudging,
inching, cheating for
some insignificant
advantage,
the lie was the
weapon and the
plot was
empty,
darkness was the
dictator.
cautiously, I allowed
myself to feel good
at times.
I found moments of
peace in cheap
rooms
just staring at the
knobs of some
dresser
or listening to the
rain in the
dark.
the less I needed
the better I
felt.
maybe the other life had worn me
down.
I no longer found
glamour
in topping somebody
in conversation.
or in mounting the
body of some poor
drunken female
whose life had
slipped away into
sorrow.
I could never accept
life as it was,
i could never gobble
down all its
poisons
but there were parts,
tenuous magic parts
open for the
asking.
I re formulated
I don’t know when,
date, time, all
that
but the change
occurred.
something in me
relaxed, smoothed
out.
i no longer had to
prove that I was a
man,
I didn’t have to prove
anything.
I began to see things:
coffee cups lined up
behind a counter in a
cafe.
or a dog walking along
a sidewalk.
or the way the mouse
on my dresser top
stopped there
with its body,
its ears,
its nose,
it was fixed,
a bit of life
caught within itself
and its eyes looked
at me
and they were
beautiful.
then- it was
gone.
I began to feel good,
I began to feel good
in the worst situations
and there were plenty
of those.
like say, the boss
behind his desk,
he is going to have
to fire me.
I’ve missed too many
days.
he is dressed in a
suit, necktie, glasses,
he says, ‘I am going
to have to let you go’
‘it’s all right’ I tell
him.
He must do what he
must do, he has a
wife, a house, children,
expenses, most probably
a girlfriend.
I am sorry for him
he is caught.
I walk onto the blazing
sunshine.
the whole day is
mine
temporarily,
anyhow.
(the whole world is at the
throat of the world,
everybody feels angry,
short-changed, cheated,
everybody is despondent,
disillusioned)
I welcomed shots of
peace, tattered shards of
happiness.
I embraced that stuff
like the hottest number,
like high heels, breasts,
singing,the
works.
(don’t get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems just for
the sake of
itself-
this is a shield and a
sickness.)
The knife got near my
throat again,
I almost turned on the
gas
again
but when the good
moments arrived
again
I didn’t fight them off
like an alley
adversary.
I let them take me,
I luxuriated in them,
I made them welcome
home.
I even looked into
the mirror
once having thought
myself to be
ugly,
I now liked what
I saw, almost
handsome, yes,
a bit ripped and
ragged,
scares, lumps,
odd turns,
but all in all,
not too bad,
almost handsome,
better at least than
some of those movie
star faces
like the cheeks of
a baby’s
butt.
and finally I discovered
real feelings of
others,
unheralded,
like lately,
like this morning,
as I was leaving,
for the track,
i saw my wife in bed,
just the
shape of
her head there
(not forgetting
centuries of the living
and the dead and
the dying,
the pyramids,
Mozart dead
but his music still
there in the
room, weeds growing,
the earth turning,
the tote board waiting for
me)
I saw the shape of my
wife’s head,
she so still,
I ached for her life,
just being there
under the
covers.
I kissed her in the
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside,
got into my marvelous
car,
fixed the seatbelt,
backed out the
drive.
feeling warm to
the fingertips,
down to my
foot on the gas
pedal,
I entered the world
once
more,
drove down the
hill
past the houses
full and empty
of
people,
I saw the mailman,
honked,
he waved
back
at me.
“Let it Enfold You” is from Betting on the Muse, pg 378:
Author: Catherine Shanahan
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: July 2018
Deep Nutrition is a book which explains the negative effects that our modern diets are having on our bodies. Dr. Shanahan provides background and reasoning for the traditional “human diet”, which is as close as we can get to the way our great-great-great grandparents ate. She explains why the traditional diet is essential and walks through the damage that vegetable oils and sugars are causing. She also discusses the modern diet’s impact on fetal/childhood development and modern diseases.
Much of the book is dedicated to the link between our nutrition and our health, as well as making the argument that the modern diet of highly processed foods is harming us and destroying our genetic momentum. The book also contains recipes, meal planning guides, and a FAQ section to help you transition as easily as possible.
We completely changed our eating habits as a result of reading Deep Nutrition, and we have never felt better. We’ve replaced all of our cooking oils and condiments, reduced our carb intake to < 50g on most days, started fermenting food, improved the quality of our food purchases, and started eating in a more nose-to-tail style. We’ve also found ourselves less interested in eating out at restaurants, especially since most of them use cheap and highly processed cooking oils (canola, cottonseed, soy, corn, safflower, etc.).
I can’t deny it. We are believers.
I am still working on processing our book highlights. We thought this book was so important that we needed to share our recommendation right away.
If you are interested in purchasing this book, you can support the website by using our Amazon affiliate link.
Both the victor
and the vanquished are
but drops of dew,
but bolts of lightning –
thus should we view the world.
Ôuchi Yoshitaka
1507-1551
This translation comes from Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death.
by W.S. Merwin
First forget what time it is for an hour do it regularly every day then forget what day of the week it is do this regularly for a week then forget what country you are in and practise doing it in company for a week then do them together for a week with as few breaks as possible follow these by forgetting how to add or to subtract it makes no difference you can change them around after a week both will help you later to forget how to count forget how to count starting with your own age starting with how to count backward starting with even numbers starting with Roman numerals starting with fractions of Roman numerals starting with the old calendar going on to the old alphabet going on to the alphabet until everything is continuous again go on to forgetting elements starting with water proceeding to earth rising in fire forget fire
Poetry Foundation: Poetry, May 1972
Author: Nikos Kazantzakis and Peter Bien
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: September 2017
Zorba the Greek sat on my reading list for many years. It came highly recommended from sources I trusted, but I never quite took the bait. I went into the book knowing nothing about it, other than hearing from Rozi that it was a wonderful read and that Zorba presents a most interesting character.
I love this book and cannot recommend it enough. It is very similar in theme to Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, but I find the characters much more interesting and lovable.
If you need some fiction that will move your spirit, Zorba the Greek is for you. Even if you think you don’t need moving function, read the book anyway. You won’t regret it.
Look, I was passing through a small village one day. An old fogey ninety years old was planting an almond tree. ‘Hey, grandpa,’ I say to him, ‘are you really planting an almond tree?’ And he, all bent over as he was, he turns and says to me, ‘My boy, I act as though I’m never going to die.’ I answered him in my turn, ‘I act as though I’m going to die at any moment.’ Which of the two of us was right, Boss?”
Zorba taught me to love life and not to fear death.
“Forgive me for saying this, Boss, but you are a pen pusher. You poor creep, you had the chance of a lifetime to see a beautiful green stone, and you didn’t see it. By God, sometimes when I have no work to do, I sit down and ask myself, ‘Is there a hell or isn’t there?’ But yesterday, when I received your letter, I said to myself, ‘There sure is a hell for certain pen pushers!’
To prolong one’s parting from a beloved friend is poison. To leave with a knife stroke is better, for it allows one to return to humanity’s natural climate: solitude.
“Emotion?” he inquired, attempting to smile.
“Yes,” I calmly replied.
“Why? Didn’t we agree? Haven’t we agreed for years now? The Japanese you love, how do they say it? Fudōoshin. Equanimity; imperturbability; one’s features an unmoving, smiling mask. Whatever happens behind the mask is one’s own business.”How was it that I, who loved life so much, had been involved with paper and ink for so many years?
“Why! Why!” he said disdainfully. “Good God, can’t anyone do something without asking why? Just like that! Because you feel like it! So take me as a cook, let’s say. I make amazing soup.”
“Are you married?”
“I’m human, am I not? To be human means to be blind. I fell face-first into the same pothole that those before me fell into. I got married, went to the dogs, down the steep slope. I became middle class, built a home, produced children. Nothing but trouble! But thank God for the santouri.”Where was some brain to get to the bottom of things? Accurate, honorable thoughts require tranquility, old age, a mouth full of false teeth. When you’ve got dentures it’s easy to say, ‘For shame, boys, no biting!’ But when you’ve got all thirty-two of your own teeth . . . A man in his youth is a wild animal, a ferocious beast who eats other men!”
Consequently, are so many murders and dirty tricks required in this world for people to gain freedom? Because, if I sat here and ticked off for you what outrages we committed and what murders, it would make your hair stand on end. Yet what was the result? Freedom! God, instead of hurling his thunderbolt to incinerate us, gives us freedom. I don’t understand anything.”
“Look here, what I’m telling you is that this world is a mystery and every human being is a great brute—a great brute and a great god.
“Yes, that’s what freedom means,” I was thinking. “To have a passion, to amass golden pounds, and suddenly to conquer your passion and throw away everything you possess—toss it into the air. Or to free yourself from one passion by obeying another that is higher. But isn’t that just a different form of slavery: sacrificing yourself for an idea, for your nationality, your God? Or could it be that the higher one’s master stands, the rope tying one to slavery is lengthened by the same amount? In that case, if we jump and frolic in a much wider domain, we die without ever discovering its boundaries. Is that what freedom means?”
I felt that this Cretan scene resembled good prose: well-worked, reticent, liberated from superfluous wealth, strong, restrained, formulating the essence by the simplest of means, refusing to play games, not deigning to employ tricks or grandiloquence, but saying what it wants to say with virile simplicity.
“You’re not hungry!” exclaimed Zorba, slapping his thigh. “But you haven’t eaten anything since morning. The body, too, has a soul. Take pity on it; give it something to eat, Boss. Give it something to eat; it’s our donkey, you know. If you don’t feed your donkey, it will abandon you halfway to your destination.”
Look, I was passing through a small village one day. An old fogey ninety years old was planting an almond tree. ‘Hey, grandpa,’ I say to him, ‘are you really planting an almond tree?’ And he, all bent over as he was, he turns and says to me, ‘My boy, I act as though I’m never going to die.’ I answered him in my turn, ‘I act as though I’m going to die at any moment.’ Which of the two of us was right, Boss?”
Those two paths are equally uplifting and rugged; both can lead to the summit. To act as though death does not exist and to act with death in mind at every moment—perhaps both paths are the same.
One thing at a time in proper order. Right now we’ve got pilaf in front of us; let our minds be pilaf. Tomorrow we’ll have lignite in front of us, so let our minds, then, be lignite. No half measures—understand?”
The entire world—earth, water, thoughts, people—was flowing toward a distant sea, and Zorba was flowing happily with it, offering no resistance, asking no questions.
Youth is fierce and inhuman because it doesn’t understand.
Workers fear a hard boss, respect him, and do good work for him; they take control of a soft boss as though he were a horse meant for them to saddle and mount, and they start loafing. Understand?”
Angered, I dug in my heels: “You have no faith, then, in human nature?”
“Don’t get angry, Boss. I have no faith in anything. If I believed in human nature, I would believe in God as well, also in the Devil. It’s a big problem. Things get all mixed up, Boss, and cause me trouble.”“Human beings are brutes!” he shouted angrily, banging his staff on the stones. “Great big brutes. The likes of you doesn’t know this; everything came to you too easily. But ask me. Brutes, I’m telling you. If you treat them badly, they respect and dread you; if you treat them well, they cause your ruin. Keep your distance, Boss. Don’t embolden people, don’t tell them that we are all one and the same, all have the same rights, because immediately they’ll trample your rights, snatch away your bread, and leave you to croak from hunger. Keep your distance, Boss, for your own good!”
“I believe in nothing and no one, only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than others, not at all—no, not at all! He, too, is a brute. But I believe in Zorba because he is the only person I have under my power, the only one I know. All the others are ghosts. I see him with my eyes, hear him with my ears, digest him with my guts. All the others, I tell you, are ghosts. When I die, everything dies; the entire Zorba-world hits rock bottom.”
“Remember what we were saying the other day, Boss? Apparently you wanted to enlighten the masses, to open their eyes. All right, go and open Uncle Anagnostis’s eyes for him. Did you notice how his wife stood there cringing and awaiting orders? Well, Your Highness, how about going now and teaching them something about women, that they have the same rights as men and that it’s truly a mean thing to eat a piece of a hog’s flesh with the hog, alive, bellowing in front of you, and that it’s hugely stupid to be tickled because God has everything while you’re starving! What will that miserable abomination, Uncle Anagnostis, profit from all this enlightening gobbledygook of yours? You’ll only cause him a mess of trouble. And what will Mrs. Anagnosti profit? Arguments will start; the hen will yearn to become the rooster, and the couple will do nothing but fight each other and suck dry each other’s blood. Let people stay placid, Boss; don’t open their eyes. If you do open them, you know what they will see: their malice and cold unsociability. So, leave their eyes closed; that way they can keep on dreaming!”
Are they going to see new forms of darkness? Let them stay where they were, with their former habits. Can’t you realize that they’ve done well enough until now? They manage—manage quite nicely. They give birth to children, have grandchildren, God makes them deaf or blind and they shout ‘Glory be to God!’ They’re at home with misfortune. So leave them where they are and shut your trap.”
I was happy; I knew that I was happy. We sense happiness with difficulty while experiencing it. Only when it has passed and we look back do we suddenly comprehend, sometimes with astonishment, how happy we have been. I, however, on this Cretan shore, was experiencing happiness while being simultaneously aware of my happiness.
“What can you expect from women? To have children by whoever happens to be available. What can you expect from men? To fall into the trap. No time to fiddle-faddle about any of that, Boss.”
“I’ve got some gray hair, Boss, and my teeth are working loose; I don’t have time to spare. You’re young. You can be patient; I can’t. As I get older I become wilder, by God. Why do people sit there and keep telling me that old age tames a person, makes him lose his zest, stretch out his neck when he sees death and say, ‘Slaughter me, please, dear agha, so that I may become a saint’? As for me, as I get older I become wilder. I don’t quit. I want to eat up the whole wide world.”
Once again I assured myself that happiness is something simple and self-restrained—a glass of wine, a chestnut, a paltry brazier, the sea’s rumble, nothing else. The only requirement for one to sense that all this is happiness is to possess a heart that is also simple and self-restrained.
Confucius says: “Many seek a happiness higher than the human being; others seek one lower. But happiness is the same height as the human being.”
“Life is trouble; death isn’t,” Zorba continued. “Do you know the definition of being alive? To undo your belt and look for trouble.”
“There are none so deaf as those who refuse to hear!”
“What’s going on, Zorba?”
“Nothing. Haven’t a single idea. I ran into a priest early this morning. Get going!”
“If there’s some danger, wouldn’t it be shameful for me to leave?”
“Yes,” Zorba answered.
“Would you leave?”
“No.”
“Well, then?”
“I have different standards for Zorba than I have for other people,” he stated with annoyance. “But since you understand that it would be shameful to leave, do not leave. Stay.”
I feel this way when I am interrupted:
He had work to do; he did not condescend to converse. “Don’t talk to me when I’m working,” he said to me one evening; “I might break in two.”
“Break in two, Zorba?” I replied. “Why?”
“There you go asking ‘Why?’ again, like a small child,” he said. “How could I explain this to you? I give myself over to my work; I stretch from toenail to scalp, extend myself to overcome the stone or coal I’m wrestling with—or the santouri. If you touch me all of a sudden, if you talk to me and make me turn, I might break in two—but how could you understand!”The world is simple, Boss—how many times do I need to tell you that? Don’t make it complicated.
What I understood deeply on that day was this: to hasten eternal rules is a mortal sin. One’s duty is confidently to follow nature’s everlasting rhythm.
Great visionaries and poets see everything in the same way—for the first time.
They see a new world before them each morning. No, they do not see this new world; they create it.
It wasn’t my destiny that brought me here (a person does whatever he wishes) but I who brought my destiny here and who worked like a dog and still works.
Dear teacher, I hope that you receive this letter of mine, which perhaps will be my last. No one knows. I have no faith in the mystical forces that supposedly protect us humans. I believe in the blind power that strikes to the right and left without malice or purpose, and that kills whoever happens to be near it.
I believe that you will understand from my letter what an unfortunate man I am. It’s only when I am with you and I talk to you that I have some hope of being relieved of my hypochondria, because Your Excellency is just like me, only you don’t know this. You, too, have a devil inside you but you still don’t know his name and because you don’t know his name, you suffocate. Baptize him, Boss, and you’ll find relief.
It’s true that you are still young, Boss, but you’ve read the wisdom of old and have become, if you’ll excuse my saying so, a bit old yourself.
I stared at her with goggle eyes. “You’re not going? Why? Don’t you want to?”
“I want to go if you come, too. If you don’t come, I don’t want to go.”
“But why? Aren’t you a free human being?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Don’t you want to be free?”
“No.”
What can I say to you, Boss? I felt I was going to have a fit. “You don’t want to be free?” I shouted. “No, I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!” Boss, I’m writing you from Lola’s room, on her paper. Pay attention, please. I believe that a human being is a person who wants to be free. Women don’t want to be free. So are women human beings? Please answer me at once.“Good God, people are wild beasts,” Zorba said suddenly, aroused by so much singing. “Boss, abandon your books! Aren’t you ashamed? People are wild beasts, and wild beasts do not read books.”
“Don’t say those words, Uncle Anagnostis. You scare a person to death.”
“Bah, never fear. Who listens to my words? And if a few do listen, who believes them? Consider: was there ever a more fortunate person? I had fields, vineyards, olive groves, and a two-story house. I was a respected man of property. My wife turned out fine—obedient, gave birth only to sons, never lifted her eyes to look me in the face. And my children also turned out well. I have no complaints. I made grandchildren, too. What more could I want? I’ve put down deep roots. Yet if I were to be born again, I’d tie a stone around my neck, like Pavlis, and fall into the sea. Life is really harsh; even the most fortunate life is harsh, blast it!”“You are young,” he said to me, smiling. “Don’t listen to old folks. If everyone listened to the aged, they’d all be quickly ruined. If a widow happens to cross your path, pounce on her! Get married, have children, don’t hesitate. Troubles are made especially for fine young stalwarts.”
The voice of those cranes, echoing once again within me, was the terrible forewarning that this life is unique for each human being, that no other life exists, that we may enjoy it, enjoy it here, that it passes quickly, and that no other opportunity will be given us in the whole of eternity.
one’s mind vows to conquer its own degradation and weakness, to conquer laziness and great futile hopes in order to catch full hold of every split second that is departing forever.
“What’s your favorite dish, granddad?”
“Everything, everything, my son. It’s a great sin to say that this food is good, that food not good.”
“Why? Can’t we choose?”
“No, we really cannot.”
“Why?”
“Because there are people who are hungry.” I fell silent out of shame. My heart had never been able to achieve such nobility and compassion.“What are ten or fifteen years?” asserted the abbess, sternly. “You fail to consider eternity?” I did not speak. I knew that eternity is each moment that passes.
Earth engenders children and feasts on them, engenders children anew, feasts on them anew—a perfect circle.
As a small child, I was in danger of falling into the well; when I grew older I was in danger of falling into the word “eternity” and also into quite a few other words: “love,” “hope,” “fatherland,” “God.” It seemed to me that I kept escaping year by year, making progress. But I was not making progress. I was merely changing one word for another and calling that liberation. Most recently, for two entire years, I had been suspended above the word “Buddha.”
Since the day I dyed my hair I’ve become another person. You may wonder, but I myself believe it, believe that I have black hair. You see, people easily forget what’s not to their advantage. And, by God, my strength increased. Lola, she, too, understood. That stitch I had in my side—here, remember it?—that’s gone, too. Unbelievable!
The great ascetic, gathering his disciples around him, cries out: “Woe to whoever does not have within him the source of happiness! Woe to whoever wishes to please others! Woe to whoever does not sense that this life and the other life are the same!”
“You laugh, Boss, and can continue if you wish. But that’s how people liberate themselves. Listen to me: they liberate themselves by being rakes, not monks.” And you: how will you get free of the Devil if you don’t become Devil and a half?”
“This is my second theory: Every idea that has real influence also has real substance. It exists. It is not a bodiless phantom wandering in the air. It has a veritable body—eyes, mouth, feet, belly. It is a man or a woman and pursues either men or women. That’s why the Gospel says, ‘The Word became flesh.’
Eternity exists even in one’s ephemeral life, but it is very difficult for us to find it on our own. Ephemeral concerns mislead us. Only very few people, the most select, manage to experience eternity in this ephemeral life. The others would be lost if God had not felt pity for them on this account and sent them religion, which enables the multitude to experience eternity.”
“Zorba, why don’t you write something that explains to us all the world’s mysteries?”
“Why don’t I? Obviously because I live all the mysteries you mention and don’t have time. Sometimes it’s people in general, sometimes women, sometimes wine, sometimes the santouri, so I don’t have a moment to grab hold of that blathering dame, the pen. So the world falls into the hands of pen pushers. Those who live the mysteries lack time and those who don’t lack time don’t live the mysteries. Got it?”Zorba, satisfied, rubbed his hands together. “This was a good day, Boss,” he said. “You’ll ask me what ‘good’ means. It means ‘full.’
“Saved from my country, saved from priests, saved from money. No more sifting. I’m increasingly finished with sifting things out; I’m simplifying. How can I express it to you? I am freeing myself, becoming a human being.”
Well, I’ve really learned something. Now I look at people and say, ‘This one is a good person, that one a bad person. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a Bulgarian or a Greek. To me they’re both the same. The only thing I ask now is whether he’s good or bad. And the older I get, yes, by the bread I eat, it seems to me that I’ll begin not to ask that either. Bah, who cares if they’re good or bad? I pity them all. When I see someone, my guts split apart even if I pretend not to give a damn. Look here, I say: this poor devil eats, drinks, loves, fears, has his God and his Devil; he, too, will kick the bucket and be laid out dead as a doornail underground to be eaten by worms. Poor miserable devil! We’re brothers, all of us. Food for worms!
‘My country,’ you keep telling me. You ought to listen to me, not to the twaddle your papers say. As long as countries exist, the human being will remain a beast, a ferocious beast. But I escaped, glory be to God, escaped. What about you?”
He once said to me, “Half-finished jobs, conversations, sins, and virtues are what have brought the world to its present mess. Reach the end, everyone! Strike; win the fight! God detests the half-Devil more than the Devil-in-chief.”
I eat larger, more delicious portions, and they don’t all become manure. Something remains, something is saved, turning into merriment, dance, song, or a slight argument. That something is what I call resurrection.”
“Damn it, my friend, Christ is risen! Oh, if only I was as young as you! Women and wine galore, sea and work galore! Full blast no matter what! Work on full blast. Wine, sex, all on full blast. No fear of God; no fear of the Devil. That’s the meaning of youth and strength.”
I don’t know how to tell you all of this to make you understand, but in my opinion none of it has any meaning.
He jumped up; his eyes misted with tears. “I can’t stay, Boss,” he said. “I’ve got to walk, to go up and down the mountain two or three times tonight, to tire myself out, so my mind can settle down. Hey you, you widow, I feel I’m going to burst if I don’t chant a dirge for you!”
Zorba went out into the yard. He was overcome by weeping, ashamed to be seen in front of women. I remember one day he said to me, “I’m not ashamed of crying in front of men. I’m a man; we’re all the same tribe and it’s not shameful for us. But in front of women we always need to appear brave. Why? Because if we started weeping in our turn, what would happen to those poor creatures? It would be the end of everything.”
turned to me again. “I want you to tell me where we come from and where we are going. You’ve been wasting away for so many years with your black magic and must have squeezed the sap out of ten or eleven thousand pounds of paper. So, what juice did you find?” Zorba’s voice was so agonized that his breath broke.
“I look down at death continually,” he said at last. “I look at it and am not afraid. Never, however, do I say, ‘I like it.’ No, I do not like it, not at all. I am free, am I not?
“Boss,” he said, as though wishing to justify himself, “every sorrow breaks my heart in two. But that organ of a thousand wounds heals immediately and the wound does not show. I am full of healed wounds; that is why I bear up.”
“New road, new plans. I’ve stopped remembering bygones, stopped seeking future prospects. What matters to me is whatever is happening right now, at this very moment. I ask myself, ‘What are you doing now, Zorba?’ ‘I’m sleeping.’ ‘All right, sleep well!’ ‘What are you doing now, Zorba?’ ‘I’m working.’ ‘All right, work well!’ ‘What are you doing now, Zorba?’ ‘I’m embracing a woman.’ ‘All right, embrace her well!’ Forget all the rest. Nothing else exists in the world except you and that woman. Shake a leg!”
“I believe, Zorba, but can be wrong, that human beings are of three kinds: those whose purpose, as they say, is to live their own lives—to eat, drink, kiss, grow rich, become famous; next are those whose purpose is to live not their own lives but the life of humanity as a whole, since they feel that all human beings are one and the same in their struggle to enlighten, to love, and benefit others; finally there are those whose purpose is to live the life of the entire universe, since all people, animals, vegetables, and stars are one and the same, one essence engaged in the same struggle—namely, to transubstantiate matter into spirit.”
“That’s difficult, Boss, very difficult. What’s needed in this instance is folly. Do you hear? Folly! You need to go the whole hog. But you’ve got intelligence, and that will eat you up. Intelligence is a grocer. It keeps accounts, writes ‘I gave this amount, got that amount, this amount the loss, that amount the gain.’ Intelligence is a good manager, you know, never putting everything on the line, always holding something back. It doesn’t break the string, oh no! That louse holds it tightly in its hands; if the string slips away, intelligence is finished, done for, the bum! But tell me, for as long as it fails to break the string, what solid basis does life have? Chamomile, diluted chamomile. What’s needed to turn the world upside down is rum!”
“You understand, and that’s what will eat you up! If you did not understand, you would be happy. What do you lack? You’re young, you have money, intelligence, you’re healthy, a fine person—you lack nothing. Nothing, blast it! Just one thing, as we said: folly. And when that’s missing, Boss—”
Little did Yorgis know that he would eventually become the protagonist of one of the greatest novels of world literature, and his character would become an ecumenical figure that set a new literary archetype: the Lover of Life, the authentic, primordial, all-embracing Dancer, a man renowned for his robust exuberance, his vigor and vitality.
With this freshness of heart, he had “a bravery to mock his very own soul, as though he possessed in him a power superior than the soul.”
But Kazantzakis takes this idea further; he proposes that even if Sisyphus succeeds in pushing the rock all the way to the top of the hill, he would then seek a higher hill, start a new ascent, for the ascent itself is the enlightenment. It is the pushing, the sweat, the struggle that transubstantiates flesh into spirit, darkness into light, mud, blood, desires, and visions into enlightenment.
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Author: Leonard Koren
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: 11/2017
I’ve recently found myself immersed in Japanese topics. I have been listening to Zen lectures by Alan Watts, working at the Japanese Tea Garden, and learning more about bonsai. I’ve also recently read Shogun, Samurai William, and Taiko, each focused on the end of the Sengoku period.
Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers also fits into the same Japanese theme. Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic aspect that permeates much of Japanese culture. Leonard Koren has created a beautiful (and short) work that seeks to demystify wabi-sabi so it can be more accessible to interested minds. Koren avoids using absolute terms to describe wabi-sabi, instead giving us a general picture of the feelings, attitudes, and qualities that imbune wabi-sabi. The books is designed, printed, and arranged in such a way to highlight these same characteristics. I appreciate Koren’s thoughtfulness in creating this work, and I find myself reviewing it on a regular basis.
If you’re looking for some artistic inspiration, have a fond love of natural processes, or are just curious about an essential element of Japanese culture, check out Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.
wabi refers to:
sabi refers to:
Similarities between modernism and wabi-sabi:
Modernism:
wabi-sabi:
Metaphysical basis: Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness
Spiritual Values:
State of mind:
Moral Precepts:
Material Qualities:
What are the lessons of the universe?
The simplicity of wabi-sabi is probably best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn’t mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into meaningful whole. It also doesn’t mean in any way diminishing something’s “interestingness,” the quality that compels us to look at that something over, and over, and over again.
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Author: Alan Watts
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: April 2017
Quick Summary: In The Book, Alan Watts seeks out to provide his children (and other learners) with a “Bible-like” replacement. The Book draws heavily from the Taoist writings and lectures that Watts gave in his later years – if you are familiar with other works where he discusses Taoism, much of this material will be familiar to you.
Watts writes this book to fill a void, one left by the lack of wonder in our lives. Even our religions no longer align with the modern human experience:
The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are—as now practiced—like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don’t seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.
Instead, Watts seeks to fill us with the spirit of the Tao and the interconnectedness of our experience. He seeks to correct us of the common illusion:
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.
I for one would say he makes a great case. Read The Book and rediscover the wonder of being alive.
Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons. –loc 88
The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.” –loc 104
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin. –loc 109
The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world “outside” us is largely hostile. We are forever “conquering” nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. –loc 114
The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It’s just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology. –loc 123
Furthermore, as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended and kept “pure,” and—because all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty—religions must make converts. The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our position. –loc 131
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness—an act of trust in the unknown. –loc 136
An ardent Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency. –loc 138
The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego. –loc 148
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. –loc 153
The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. –loc 155
Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: “Where did the world come from?” “Why did God make the world?” “Where was I before I was born?” “Where do people go when they die?” Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, –loc 171
The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way “up there.” We don’t feel this bond in today’s egalitarian freedom. We don’t even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. –loc 213
Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts … “the Ultimate Ground of Being,” he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction. –loc 217
In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself. –loc 239
Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt. –loc 265
You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. –loc 268
The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality. –loc 268
Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. –loc 271
Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self. There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you ought to break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, the Self) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, and so bring the drama of life on earth to its close in a vast explosion. –loc 273
Because of this habit of ignoring space-intervals, we do not realize that just a sound is a vibration of sound/silence, the whole universe (that is, existence) is a vibration of solid/space. For solids and spaces go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion. –loc 328
The narrow slit in the fence is much like the way in which we look at life by conscious attention, for when we attend to something we ignore everything else. Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together—as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam. Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of the world after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television, and Norbert Wiener and his colleagues found some evidence that there is a similar process in the brain. –loc 372
But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events. We often say that you can only think of one thing at a time. The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects. We do not see that the world is all of a piece like the head-tailed cat. –loc 378
We also speak of attention as noticing. To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore—for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignore-ance (i.e., ignorance) despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice. Physically, we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch innumerable features that we never notice. You can drive thirty miles, talking all the time to a friend. What you noticed, and remembered, was the conversation, but somehow you responded to the road, the other cars, the traffic lights, and heaven knows what else, without really noticing, or focussing your mental spotlight upon them. So too, you can talk to someone at a party without remembering, for immediate recall, what clothes he or she was wearing, because they were not noteworthy or significant to you. Yet certainly your eyes and nerves responded to those clothes. You saw, but did not really look. –loc 383
What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. –loc 397
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages. There is no English word for a type of feeling which the Japanese call yugen, and we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which Japanese people use the word. –loc 399
We must, however, be careful of taking animals as models of “perfectly natural” behavior. If “natural” means “good” or “wise,” human beings can improve on animals, though they do not always do so. –loc 425
(Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.) –loc 454
The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them. –loc 469
the constant awareness of death shows the world to be as flowing and diaphanous as the filmy patterns of blue smoke in the air—that there really is nothing to clutch and no one to clutch it. This is depressing only so long as there remains a notion that there might be some way of fixing it, of putting it off just once more, or hoping that one has, or is, some kind of ego-soul that will survive bodily dissolution. –loc 474
Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “I” and all other “things” now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them—to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. –loc 478
Just try taking a stroll after dark in a nice American residential area. If you can penetrate the wire fences along the highways, and then wander along a pleasant lane, you may well be challenged from a police car: “Where are you going?” Aimless strolling is suspicious and irrational. You are probably a vagrant or burglar. You are not even walking the dog! “How much money are you carrying?” Surely, you could have afforded to take the bus and if you have little or no cash, you are clearly a bum and a nuisance. –loc 520
Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home. As already suggested, fast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point. –loc 524
Despite the fact that more accidents happen in the home than elsewhere, increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools. All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bio-electronic body. –loc 529
Consider the astonishing means now being made for snooping, the devices already used in offices, factories, stores, and on various lines of communication such as the mail and the telephone. Through the transistor and miniaturization techniques, these devices become ever more invisible and ever more sensitive to faint electrical impulses. The trend of all this is towards the end of individual privacy, to an extent where it may even be impossible to conceal one’s thoughts. At the end of the line, no one is left with a mind of his own: there is just a vast and complex community-mind, endowed, perhaps, with such fantastic powers of control and prediction that it will already know its own future for years and years to come. –loc 536
The science-fiction in which we have just been indulging has, then, two important morals. The first is that if the game of order-versus-chance is to continue as a game, order must not win. As prediction and control increase, so, in proportion, the game ceases to be worth the candle. We look for a new game with an uncertain result. In other words, we have to hide again, perhaps in a new way, and then seek in new ways, since the two together make up the dance and the wonder of existence. Contrariwise, chance must not win, and probably cannot, because the order/chance polarity appears to be of the same kind as the on/off and up/down. –loc 561
In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass, to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are. The question is then whether technical progress actually “gets anywhere” in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life. –loc 599
We seem to use “I” for something in the body but not really of the body, for much of what goes on in the body seems to happen to “I” in the same way as external events. “I” is used as the center of voluntary behavior and conscious attention, but not consistently. Breathing is only partially voluntary, and we say “I was sick” or “I dreamed” or “I fell asleep” as if the verbs were not passive but active. –loc 642
This controlling officer “sees” sights, “hears” sounds, “feels” feelings, and “has” experiences. These are common but redundant ways of talking, for seeing a sight is just seeing, hearing a sound is just hearing, feeling a feeling is just feeling, and having an experience is just experiencing. But that these redundant phrases are so commonly used shows that most people think of themselves as separate from their thoughts and experiences. All this can get marvelously complicated when we begin to wonder whether our officer has another officer inside his head, and so ad infinitum! –loc 651
There was a young man who said, “Though It seems that I know that I know, What I would like to see Is the ‘I’ that knows ‘me’ When I know that I know that I know.” –loc 656
However much we divide, count, sort, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided. –loc 705
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. –loc 711
According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. –loc 753
In one form or another, the myth of the Fully Automatic Model has become extremely plausible, and in some scientific and academic disciplines it is as much a sacrosanct dogma as any theological doctrine of the past—despite contrary trends in physics and biology. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik—victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible. –loc 768
If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. –loc 809
Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. –loc 815
the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound. –loc 826
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. –loc 830
Children are in no position to see the contradictions in these demands, and even if some prodigy were to point them out, he would be told summarily not to “answer back,” and that he lacked respect for his “elders and betters.” Instead of giving our children clear and explicit explanations of the game-rules of the community, we befuddle them hopelessly because we—as adults—were once so befuddled, and, remaining so, do not understand the game we are playing. –loc 864
The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways: The first rule of this game is that it is not a game. Everyone must play. You must love us. You must go on living. Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role. Control yourself and be natural. Try to be sincere. –loc 870
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. –loc 878
Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead. –loc 879
The Arthashastra does not forget to warn the tyrant that he can never win. He may rise to eminence through ambition or the call of duty, but the more absolute his power, the more he is hated, and the more he is the prisoner of his own trap. The web catches the spider. He cannot wander at leisure in the streets and parks of his own capital, or sit on a lonely beach listening to the waves and watching the gulls. Through enslaving others he himself becomes the most miserable of slaves. –loc 895
We must learn to include ourselves in the round of cooperations and conflicts, of symbiosis and preying, which constitutes the balance of nature, for a permanently victorious species destroys, not only itself, but all other life in its environment. –loc 914
We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash! –loc 940
The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. –loc 946
Thus bamboozled, the individual—instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world—is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. –loc 954
For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now. –loc 958
Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy. –loc 977
We have untold stacks of recorded music from every age and culture, and the most superb means of playing it. But who actually listens? Maybe a few pot-smokers. –loc 986
we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content. The explanation is simple: most of our products are being made by people who do not enjoy making them, whether as owners or workers. Their aim in the enterprise is not the product but money, and therefore every trick is used to cut the cost of production and hoodwink the buyer, by coloring and packaging chicanery, into the belief that the product is well and truly made. The only exceptions are those products which simply must be excellent for reasons of safety or high cost of purchase—aircraft, computers, space-rockets, scientific instruments, and so forth. –loc 989
when you have made the money what will you buy with it? Other pretentious fakes made by other money-mad manufacturers. The few real luxuries on the market are imports from “backward” countries where peasants and craftsmen still take pride in their work. –loc 997
The poets and sages have, indeed, been saying for centuries that success in this world is vanity. “The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes,” or, as we might put it in a more up-to-date idiom, just when our mouth was watering for the ultimate goodies, it turns out to be a mixture of plaster-of-paris, papier-mâché, and plastic glue. Comes in any flavor. I have thought of putting this on the market as a universal substance, a prima materia, for making anything and everything—houses, furniture, flowers, bread (they use it already), apples, and even people. –loc 1003
We have now found out that many things which we felt to be basic realities of nature are social fictions, arising from commonly accepted or traditional ways of thinking about the world. These fictions have included: 1. The notion that the world is made up or composed of separate bits or things. 2. That things are differing forms of some basic stuff. 3. That individual organisms are such things, and that they are inhabited and partially controlled by independent egos. 4. That the opposite poles of relationships, such as light/darkness and solid/space, are in actual conflict which may result in the permanent victory of one of the poles. 5. That death is evil, and that life must be a constant war against it. 6. That man, individually and collectively, should aspire to be top species and put himself in control of nature. –loc 1036
Remember that Aristotle’s and Newton’s preoccupation with causal determinism was that they were trying to explain how one thing or event was influenced by others, forgetting that the division of the world into separate things and events was a fiction. To say that certain events are causally connected is only a clumsy way of saying that they are features of the same event, like the head and tail of the cat. –loc 1058
Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call “things” are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation. –loc 1063
the movement of any feature of the world cannot be ascribed to the outside alone or to the inside alone. Both move together. –loc 1081
Everything labeled with a noun is demonstrably a process or action, but language is full of spooks, like the “it” in “It is raining,” which are the supposed causes of action. –loc 1128
As the Chinese say, the various features of a situation “arise mutually” or imply one another as back implies front, and as chickens imply eggs—and vice versa. They exist in relation to each other like the poles of the magnet, only more complexly patterned. –loc 1139
We can never, never describe all features of the total situation, not only because every situation is infinitely complex, but also because the total situation is the universe. –loc 1152
Fortunately, we do not have to describe any situation exhaustively, because some of its features appear to be much more important than others for understanding the behavior of the various organisms within it. We never get more than a sketch of the situation, yet this is enough to show that actions (or processes) must be understood, or explained, in terms of situations just as words must be understood in the context of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, libraries, and … life itself. –loc 1154
To sum up: just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by “understanding” or “comprehension” is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don’t compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time. –loc 1157
It is easy enough to see that an intelligent human being implies an intelligent human society, for thinking is a social activity—a mutual interchange of messages and ideas based on such social institutions as languages, sciences, libraries, universities, and museums. But what about the non-human environment in which human society flourishes? –loc 1167
Somehow the first set of conditions seems to preserve the reality of the rainbow apart from an observer. But the second set, by eliminating a good, solid “external reality,” seems to make it an indisputable fact that, under such conditions, there is no rainbow. The reason is only that it supports our current mythology to assert that things exist on their own, whether there is an observer or not. It supports the fantasy that man is not really involved in the world, that he makes no real difference to it, and that he can observe reality independently without changing it. –loc 1223
Is it possible that all geological and astronomical history is a mere extrapolation—that it is talking about what would have happened if it had been observed? Perhaps. But I will venture a more cautious idea. The fact that every organism evokes its own environment must be corrected with the polar or opposite fact that the total environment evokes the organism. Furthermore, the total environment (or situation) is both spatial and temporal—both larger and longer than the organisms contained in its field. The organism evokes knowledge of a past before it began, and of a future beyond its death. At the other pole, the universe would not have started, or manifested itself, unless it was at some time going to include organisms—just as current will not begin to flow from the positive end of a wire until the negative terminal is secure. –loc 1240
In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving “I” as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone. –loc 1252
Erwin Schrödinger: It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. –loc 1275
Schrödinger goes on to suggest: Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.4 1For this illustration I am indebted to Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances. –loc 1285
For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment. –loc 1324
But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. –loc 1339
The separate person is without content, in both senses of the word. He lives perpetually on hope, on looking forward to tomorrow, having been brought up this way from childhood, when his uncomprehending rage at double-binds was propitiated with toys. –loc 1341
The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an “I” for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but. –loc 1371
If, then, after understanding, at least in theory, that the ego-trick is a hoax and that, beneath everything, “I” and “universe” are one, you ask, “So what? What is the next step, the practical application?”—I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give—to the cause of peace or of racial integration, to starving Hindus and Chinese, or even to your closest friends. Without this, all social concern will be muddlesome meddling, and all work for the future will be planned disaster. –loc 1377
But as I pursue these games—as I become more conscious of being conscious, more aware that I am unable to define myself as being up without you (or something other than myself) being down—I see vividly that I depend on your being down for my being up. I would never be able to know that I belong to the in-group of “nice” or “saved” people without the assistance of an out-group of “nasty” or “damned” people. –loc 1398
How can any in-group maintain its collective ego without relishing dinner-table discussions about the ghastly conduct of outsiders? –loc 1402
All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools—that is, so long as the major kick in life is to “amount to something” or to “be someone” as a particular and separate godlet. –loc 1407
There it is, a theoretically undeniable fact. But the question is how to get over the sensation of being locked out from everything “other,” of being only oneself—an organism flung into unavoidable competition and conflict with almost every “object” in its experience. There are innumerable recipes for this project, almost all of which have something to recommend them. There are the practices of yoga meditation, dervish dancing, psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, Ignatian, Salesian, and Hesychast methods of “prayer,” the use of consciousness-changing chemicals such as LSD and mescaline, psychodrama, group dynamics, sensory-awareness techniques, Quakerism, Gurdjieff exercises, relaxation therapies, the Alexander method, autogenic training, and self-hypnosis. The difficulty with every one of these disciplines is that the moment you are seriously involved, you find yourself boxed in some special in-group which defines itself, often with the most elegant subtlety, by the exclusion of an out-group. –loc 1413
In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question “Who or what am I?”—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art, or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else’s depth or failure. –loc 1434
Don’t try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process—like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one’s ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is. –loc 1455
This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various “spiritual exercises” in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to “get” some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps. But there is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to “get culture” or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. –loc 1459
Understanding this, you will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn’t. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with—perhaps—a touch of heredity thrown in. This may give you the temporary feeling of being a zombie or a puppet dancing irresponsibly on strings that lead away to unknown forces. At this point, the ego may reassert itself with the insidious “I-can’t-help-myself” play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim. “See, I’m only a bundle of conditioned reflexes, so you mustn’t get angry with me for acting just as I feel.” (To which the answer could be, “Well, we’re just zombies too, so you shouldn’t complain if we get angry.”) –loc 1468
What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that—in this sense—self is other and here is there. –loc 1489
Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities—to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it. –loc 1497
A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” –loc 1512
To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play. –loc 1516
The point is that “spectacle is so fascinating.” For the world is a spell (in Latin, fascinum), an enchantment (being thrilled by a chant), an amazement (being lost in a maze), an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game. –loc 1552
The only real “you” is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For “you” is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is. –loc 1568
And do not suppose that this understanding will transform you all at once into a model of virtue. I have never yet met a saint or sage who did not have some human frailties. For so long as you manifest yourself in human or animal form, you must eat at the expense of other life and accept the limitations of your particular organism, which fire will still burn and wherein danger will still secrete adrenalin. –loc 1580
The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the “offensive other” is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out. This will give you the priceless ability of being able to contain conflicts so that they do not get out-of-hand, of being willing to compromise and adapt, of playing, yes, but playing it cool. –loc 1582
If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or nonhuman, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the “external” world—especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside. –loc 1604
If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. –loc 1617
It comes, then, to this: that to be “viable,” livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game—and the “must” here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. –loc 1624
Finally, the game of life as Western man has been “playing” it for the past century needs less emphasis on practicality, results, progress, and aggression. –loc 1645
Whatever may be true for the Chinese and the Hindus, it is timely for us to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage, and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation instead of action. However much we may now disagree with Aristotle’s logic and his metaphors, he must still be respected for reminding us that the goal of action is always contemplation—knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming. –loc 1647
The people we are tempted to call clods and boors are just those who seem to find nothing fascinating in being human; their humanity is incomplete, for it has never astonished them. There is also something incomplete about those who find nothing fascinating in being. –loc 1674
Frankly, the image of God the Father has become ridiculous—that is, unless you read Saint Thomas Aquinas or Martin Buber or Paul Tillich, and realize that you can be a devout Jew or Christian without having to believe, literally, in the Cosmic Male Parent. –loc 1813
In the words of a Chinese Zen master, “Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh!” –loc 1858
Thus we do not trust the universe to repeat what it has already done—to “I” itself again and again. We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger—a visitor who hardly belongs—for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself—through our eyes and IT’s. –loc 1893
