...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, LIVES, POETIC NONSENSE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

GO TOO FAR

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GO TOO FAR

Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher, described as the ″James Dean of philosophy″.  Throughout his life, Camus spoke out against and actively opposed Totalitarianism in its many forms. Early on, Camus was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, even directing the famous Resistance journal, Combat. On the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers he wrote: “Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.”

Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, dualism becomes a paradox: we value our own lives in spite of our mortality and in spite of the universe’s silence. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus investigates our experience of the Absurd and asks how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?

ART, FREE ADVICE, INSIDE THE BOOK, READING MATTER

DOUBLETHINK

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DOUBLETHINK — “To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy is impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”

~ George Orwell, from the book 1984

...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, INSIDE THE BOOK, MORTALITY MECHANIC'S MANUAL, POETIC NONSENSE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

MAGIC DOGMA

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“There is only one dogma in Magic: The visible is the manifestation of the invisible. The visible bears an exact proportion to the things which are inappreciable by our senses and unseen by our eyes.  Above, immensity: Below immensity! Immensity equals immensity. This is true in things seen, as in things unseen.”

after Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic.  From MORTALITY MECHANIC’S MANUAL by Lawrence R. Spencer