Day 36
I want to quote three passages of work from three separate writers, each coming from an extremely different background. Read them carefully, and see what kind of common ground you might be able to find.
First, from Douglas Adams:
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."
Now, from Herbert Simon:
"We watch an ant make his labourious way across a wind and wave-molded beach. He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dunelet, detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a compatriot. Thus he maes his weaving, halting way back to his home... Viewed as a geometic figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant."
And Finally, three consecutive numbered passages (the whole book is divided in this complicated and uncommon way) from the final pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus:
6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts - not what can be expresses by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhealthy man.
6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
6.4311 Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
First, from Douglas Adams:
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."
Now, from Herbert Simon:
"We watch an ant make his labourious way across a wind and wave-molded beach. He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dunelet, detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a compatriot. Thus he maes his weaving, halting way back to his home... Viewed as a geometic figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant."
And Finally, three consecutive numbered passages (the whole book is divided in this complicated and uncommon way) from the final pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus:
6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts - not what can be expresses by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhealthy man.
6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
6.4311 Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
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