3 posts tagged “filthy humans”

What is your favorite quote and why?

"Two things always fill me with wonder:  the starry heavens above and the moral law within."--Immanuel Kant  (that quotation gets various translated, but the gist remains the same)

Well, I don't know.  Isn't it obvious why I like that one so much?  It's not only the moral law but the faculties that have given us the power of making and following moral law.  The consciousness, the language, and okayyyyy the compassion.  Whatever.  You feely types.

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."--Martin Heidegger

I have found this absolutely to be true.  And right now I'm reading a Don DeLillo book (Falling Man) and I wonder, as I have before reading his books, if he is aware that he is essentially Heideggerian, or if it's just coincidence.  White Noise is almost as Heideggerian as Being and Time.  Only without the jargon and confusing capitalizations.

Eh, every time one of these questions comes up about favorite quotations, I'm always there with the dour Germans.  I don't know what gets into me.  But Don DeLillo isn't German!

How about this one, then:

"You may not be strong, you may not be smart, but you sure are a hairy little monkey."--some sitcom a long time ago.

And finally I leave with one I have seen so many times but have only just learned to appreciate in the past few years:  AMOR FATI. 

People get a lot of weird ideas about the study of philosophy, the most irritating of which is that philosophy is very simple and anyone could do it (uh huh, sure, go read Sources of the Self, and then we'll talk, ok?  No, really, go read it.  It's one of the most important books that came out in the 20th century.  I'll wait).  But one of the most constant is that philosophy majors are let in on the secret to the Meaning of Life at some point in the game, probably just before graduating.  Whenever some nincompoop has come up and asked me what this big secret is, I have usually hemmed and hawed.  Heidegger is fucking hard to explain in the 30 second American attention span.

But more and more I am finding the links between disparate philosophies and religions, finding more connections than points of dispute.  I don't really do political philosophy, admittedly, and I long ago gave myself over to Continental (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon--silly crackers) thought.  There is much that can be said about it--there is a lot of ontological frottage in there--but if you put the Heidegger quote together with the notion of loving your fate, I think that's all there really is.  I think that's the meaning of life, right there.  It's the key to beauty, to ethics, to happiness, to truth such as it is. 

There.  I've just shared with you all the meaning of life. 

Sadly, it seems to be difficult for weak and filthy humans to do.  Work on it, people.

P.S.  Do not go look "frottage" up in the dictionary, ok?

It snowed all day.  All day and most of last night, and apparently it's set to do it again tonight.  When that happens, you have to really stay on top of the snow removal or else you get stranded (particularly when you drive a Toyota Yaris that has, like, 5 inches of ground clearance).

So I was out shoveling out the driveway (or, really, mostly sweeping it, as it is very, very dry snow) and a neighbor came up riding an ATV with a snowplow attachment and offered to plow our driveway out for us.  I respectfully and gratefully declined--it was nice of her to offer.

But this is one of the things that I think is so intensely stupid about modern American life.  It's a driveway and a front stoop; it took about 10 or 15 minutes of sweeping to get it totally cleared out (granted that has a lot to do with it being such powdery snow).  Meanwhile, for those 10 or 15 minutes, I created no pollution, I spent no money, and I got some exercise.  I also got to have fun with my son, who loves helping sweep and shovel, and the dogs who enjoyed wading through the virgin meter or so of snow accumulated in the front yard.  Why would I want a machine to do that for me?  What would I really gain from it?  I'd get less exercise, pump out noise and air pollution, and free up 10 minutes maybe ...to do what, exactly?

There is a pattern in which Americans will pay for something to make their life more convenient by doing some bit of trivial work for them, then pay to go to a gym or pay for exercise equipment (which, likely, they don't use enough) and go do that separate from their chores, then in the overall scheme of things, it's saving them nothing.  Maybe they get a little extra time, which most studies suggest they spend sitting unproductively on their asses watching reality shows.  Feh. 

I think about the garden the same way.  True, it's a lot of work, although it could be done in easier ways than I did last year, and the canning and freezing take time and effort and forethought.  On the other hand, it's work that, again, creates relatively little (canning and freezing create some, but far less than the alternatives would) pollution, gives us exercise and vitamin D from all the being out in the sun.  The alternative is to not garden, work more hours for money that I can then exchange for food--food that creates an unknown quantity of pollution and does not require me to exercise.  Most importantly to me, the time spent gardening is time spent with my family, as we garden together, while time spent working more hours to make more money is time spent away from my family.  It's also time spent caring for living things and getting back in touch with nature and the season cycle.  My most high-tech piece of gym equipment is a wheelbarrow, and my son is getting quite an education while we're out there, too.  It's all win-win. 

Our bodies need to do hard work, and so do our minds.  The human body and brain were not meant to spend most of the day sitting, let alone sitting reading gossip web sites and watching TV.  Until T and I are much too old and infirm to handle a snow shovel and a rake, I expect we'll carry on like this.  You wanna feel our biceps?

List five reasons (at least) why you are awesome.
Submitted by goobers18.

I should think my awesomeness, already apparent to everyone, is of the type that can hardly be defined, let alone summarized in a neat, bulleted list.  The awesome is too great to be contained by you and your numeric-organizational fetish.

*sigh*  Well, here are 5 reasons why I am awesome today:

1. I get phone calls in the middle of the night from Australia.
2. I can teach Australians to make pancakes over the phone in the middle of the night.
3. I watch Invader Zim with my 2-year-old, thus introducing him to important vocabulary such as "doom" and "filthy humans."
4. The pumpkin polenta I made...yes, awesome.
5. I grew both the pumpkin and the thyme I used to make the pumpkin polenta.