MILAN KUNDERA / The Unbearable Lightness of Being

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

    If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

    But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

    The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

    Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements are as free as they are insignificant.

    What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

    Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

    Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.

   Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

JON MCGREGOR / If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

He says do you want to see another special thing, and he points to the rooftops opposite, he says can you clap your hands for your daddy, and when she does so the whole ridgepole of pidgeons springs up into the air, ballooning off down the street as a group, circling, landing on another rooftop in a matching single line.

He says, do you see them now, do you see they do not bump into one another, do you think this is special? and she looks at him and she thinks she should nod so she does.
He says you know in the place you were born in, and he doesn't say back home because he doesn't want her to think like that but that is what he means, back home where they were a family and they belonged, he says in the place you were born in there would be flocks of thousands of birds, gathering at dusk, and when they tunred in mid-air the whole sky would go dark as though Allah was flipping the shutters closed for a second. And not any of those thousands collided he says, do you think this is special?
He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

Angels, he says, and she leans forward as if she is expecting him to pass on a secret. I do not know about angels he says, perhaps there are many, perhaps they are here now he says, and she looks around and stands closer to him and he smiles. But there are people too he says, everywhere there are people and I think it is easier to hold hands with people than it is with angels, yes?
He stops to get his breath back, he knows he is confusing her and maybe boring her, he knows that really he is saying these things to himself.

June 16, 2007 : A Youth Saturday

I really wanted to take photos during the worship but I wasn't sure if it would be polite or allowed... anyway.
1) Ultimate Worship Experience
2) Gian's place, where a lot of the photos weren't even taken by me, the camera kept disappearing from my side.

0206 - 0226, the last bit, are from the swimming thing at joey's a few weeks ago, the 6th i think. i threw them in here because there were too little to put up a separate album.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER / Everything Is Illuminated

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in Front of One’s Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her violin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel, I have learned to play this one too! It’s so terrible! I must write something that not even I can play! She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast, They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I’m being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists. She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.

Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.

What color is this?

He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked,  It certainly tastes like red.

Yes, it is red, isn’t it?

Seems so.

She buried her head in her hands, But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?

Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily… None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don’t love you. Poem too long: I don’t love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don’t love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don’t love you. Nothing felt like anything more than it actually was. Everything was a just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

If we were to open to a random page in her journal – which she must have kept and kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it – we would find some rendering of the following sentiment: I am not in love.

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love – loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

 

June 2, 2007 : Garage Sale / Prayer Meeting

0012 - 0034 taken by javi ("dude keep moving your mouth!")
and i think 0059 - 0068 were taken by juls because he's the only other one i remember who borrowed the camera

i don't know why multiply always messes up the last photo in the album. plus it won't let me add photos, wtf.