Sunday, September 14, 2014

The unbearable lightness of being

Nietzsche was wrong - there is no eternal return; 
our lives occur only once,
 and that makes them light.
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Parmenides was wrong - such lightness is not sweet,
 it is unbearable.


"It's scary, almost paralyzing, to think about eternal return. But on the other hand, it means our lives have meaning, significance, weight. And we can learn to love that. Conversely, lightness may seem at first to be a sweet deal – no responsibility, no judgment, no meaning. Sounds like fun – at first. But eventually, we would like for our lives to mean something. We want them to have weight and significance, because we want them to matter.
The problem is, try as we might to give our lives weight…we cannot. Our lives are fundamentally light precisely because they occur only once. "

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Einmal ist keinmal
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There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; 
pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts...
There’s fennel for you, and columbines; there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; 
we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. 
There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died. They say he made a good end,— [Sings.]“For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.
She is not someone you understand. She is someone you watch, someone you use, someone you mourn. She is made for love but love is not made for her. Everything about her runs deeper than in you; her madness is truer, her mind brighter and better broken, and her anguish is in her bones, not her blood. You will never forgive her for dying, but she will aways be dead forever, and your horror means nothing to her anymore. That, more than anything is why you still dream about her and her flowers thrown like curses. She has made herself no longer yours to dream of, choking on her water, crawling through her weeds, living beneath the world; her body inviolate and violable no more, there in her resting place where no man rules.” 

Ophelia.
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