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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

28 December - Blogs I'm Following II

Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia)Image via Wikipedia

"'The Imp of the Perverse': Edgar Allan Poe Updated for the 21st Century"

Induction - that is, straight-forward observation should have brought popular psychology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more nuanced, scientific term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, an instinctive drive with no accompanying evolutionary goal. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a biological contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the claim as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not.

In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.

 

from Running 'Cause I Can't Fly by noreply@blogger.com (CoyotePrime)
“Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future”
by Olaf Stapledon

“Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.

But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man."

Freely download "Last and First Men" here:
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=3939

Relaxpls Takes You On a Soothing Desktop Vacation [Chrome Extensions]

from Lifehacker by Alan Henry
Chrome/Web: Working all day with only the sounds of the office to entertain you and only the cubicle wall above your desk to keep you company can be stressful. Relaxpls is a webapp and Chrome extension that offers you a quick break with some soothing nature sounds and full-screen images that you can toggle whenever the day is getting a little too rough to handle. Just pop on your headphones, full-screen your browser window, and relax. More »  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Layton
Layton died on August 22, 2011, aged 61, after suffering from an undisclosed type of cancer. ...

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