Friday 13 September 2002

Pic of the day: Late summer thistle. There's some song about a rose and a butterfly and a thistle floating around in my head, but it's in Norwegian.

Quality or quantity?

I think I'm writing too much. By writing a long entry when nothing happens, I obscure the few things that actually do happen.

Perhaps I should put small placeholder entries on some days and spend a couple days writing a better, gray entry.

***

Or perhaps I should stop writing the gray entries too. Who cares anyway? "Opinions are like [anus]: Everybody has one, and they all stink." Perhaps this a necessary price for democracy: Since all have the same vote, all opinions must be equally valid.

But do you really need to have an opinion on things you don't know even the bare essentials about? On the other hand, do you need to know everything to understand how things work?

I believe there is room for the informed layman. There should be something in between the simple emotional outburst and the post-doctorate publication. There must be room for something in between "religion suxx!" and "dissertation on the significance of the immaculate conception in Catholic theology 1550-1650".

I feel that increasingly, philosophy has become the last refuge of the incompetent. Originally philosophy meant "love of wisdom", but over time it has spun off virtually all the sciences and become "love of abstraction" instead. It seems that each school of philosophy invents its own words, or uses old words in a new meaning. What is the point of talking if you cannot be understood? I believe in the philosophy of everyday life. To see how things are connected. How faraway events influence us, and we influence them.

I intend to continue to write this journal for as long as I physically can. But I will probably write less each day, most days. Sometimes very little.