#philosophy

The latest issue of New Philosopher magazine is about memory, and contains this wonderful quotation:

When a person endeavours to recall his early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there, some feature in the landscape – hill or wood or tower or spire – touched and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence or regular progression – nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape.

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We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive.

For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's are, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating.

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This is why Aristotle thought that you can't judge whether a man was "happy" until after he's dead. And sometimes until long after he's died, because it would depend on the actions of, say, his offspring (which would reflect the way he helped raise them).

It is not too far-fetched to link the silence at the end of a musical performance with death. In Moscow, on the gravestone of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke is carved a stave with the semi-circle and dot of a fermata, the sign that indicates that a note (or in this case a pause) is to be held. Underneath is written ‘fff’ (one step above fortissimo, meaning very, very loud).

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Aren’t you excited about the party? What with all the small talk and the rumours and the canapés on a little plate? People are decked out in fine clothes, handbags and shoes, cracking dad jokes while catching food in their mouths with haste and vigour. The kids have been excused. Weren’t they just babies? Time flies, except on the man who drinks his first beer too fast (or our age and you know he’s not just old enough to drink now). As you slip into the party you don’t know anyone, so you make a show of making yourself busy and show nervous excitement. We sit in lounge chairs and chat, pretending the world will never end. Something awful can happen at this barbecue, but the good part never comes. The time passes and eventually you can leave.

Do you ever get tired of your own skin? Do you ever get tired of your own thoughts? Do you ever get tired of the same conversations, the same news, the same cultural indoctrinations in public discourse? So the magazines, we tuck our innermost thoughts away in drawers, concerned about the rain. We’re good enough to live under the same slight of hand. There are the masks, too, which everybody gets in the end.

I’m pretty good at detecting nonsense. We all feel alone because I think I don’t acknowledge them when I say I feel alone. I’m not the first weak-tailed dandy to have written an essay of despair, but I am a contemporary person, an existentialist who said that humans are built to feel scared and sad but we’re inevitably lonely. And yet, we geniuses have designed a society in which expressing true feelings in public is discouraged. So the masks again, the eyebrows too.

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I can't help but think that if we were to start again with governments we wouldn't have what we've got now. I certainly think that our response to the climate crisis would be better if we took a more anarchist approach.