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Commentary
- Bruce on Ode to a Cat
- Aslandad on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
Category Archives: Philosophy
Terry Eagleton on Cultural Theory
“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.” After Theory by Terry Eagleton, 2003.
“The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
“So I resolved to do a very peculiar thing. I resolved to keep death in view–constantly, daily. And if you’ve read a lot of my work on this blog, then you know how I continue to work through the dynamics of holding onto faith while simultaneously refusing to allow faith to repress death anxiety. I try to hold both–faith and death–firmly in view. And why, you might ask, would I intentionally engage in this odd and existentially unsettling activity? Why not let faith eliminate or repress my death anxiety? Because this path of mine is the only way I know of which can assure me that my faith isn’t, to use Sartre’s term, bad faith, that my faith has nothing to do with repressing death anxiety or awareness.”
“I might sound morbid, dwelling about death all the time. But I’m not depressive. The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness. Poignancy is the feeling I have when I tuck my boys in at night. Life is so short and I have no way to know how much time we will have together. It was poignant to drive my mom to MD Anderson. And it was poignant to wait for her during her appointments. I find everything, because the North Wind is with me, poignant. It is…
Posted in Philosophy, Religion
Tagged Death, Faith, George MacDonald, Poignancy, Sadness, Sartre
4 Comments
He turns on to 13th & Willamette, but so does the woman in the car.
“Chances are we’ll each be lost to time. 100 billion people have been born before us. Most of them no longer exist as individuals in our memories. No names. Faces only reflected in our own and not in any way that really matters.
But not us. We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won’t be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they’ll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we’ve entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed.
We won’t matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names. $viewcount++.
Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade.”
- Joel Johnson
http://gizmodo.com/5491404/raiding-eternity
***
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.
- Woody Allen
Brother, Sister
“Hallelujah, I have a sister. Hallelujah, I have a brother.” Don’t let the profundity of those words slip past you. Don’t let it be as plain as it may sound coming off your tongue. It is a sheer and raw fact. It is defiant. It is obstinate. It shall smack you in the face, as surely as the fact that you will die someday.
Someone you did not choose and could never have designed, requested, or planned for is there. From when simple camaraderie infects your interactions and takes you to where you are home, to when greatly beyond all others they have gotten on your nerves and upset you – ponder the miracle bestowed upon you.
Whatever you do, don’t be indifferent. Don’t be modern (read: bored). What would it take for this to hit you? The threat of their absence from your life? Well that threat is quite real and certain. It will happen eventually.
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” – GK Chesterton