Thursday 18 May 2000

Pic of the day: Not so stylish sheet ...
If today's diary seems thoroughly disturbed in format (not only in content as usual), blame it on my desperate attempt to embed an embryonic Style Sheet in the header of the document. I still have a problem seeing what those critters are good for, but being the curious person I am, I still play with it. Mail me if it does unspeakable things to your poor browser, OK? Because otherwise it may grow over time into a real stylesheet file. Perhaps.

Automisanthropology

I remember in part the last dream. I was walking outside in the terrain and there were great flat slabs of stone here and there standing diagonally, leaning on a low column-like stone. They seemed to be spread out in a pattern. My main character observed them but found nothing to do with them, no clear meaning. Then the place was flooded with newbies and I woke up.

And a realization was brilliantly clear in my mind, as I woke up: "You can always learn something from listening to nature. At least you can learn that nature is not very talkative."

And the vision that was planted in my brain
still remains
within the sound of silence.

***

Auto-mis-anthropo-logy (n): The study of why I, of all people, am up to no good.

On my way from the bus to work I passed by a brand new clothes shop displaying some beautiful dresses. And I pondered the injustice: Typical, that it should be an all female clothes shop, as if they did not have enough already! And then suddenly I remembered: I already have more clothes than I should. I said so myself, yesterday! Ouch.

And isn't it peculiar how this revelation has come to me on that particular month where virtually every bill came due, so that I have deployed nearly all my salary already? Hmm. The next month should see a much bigger windfall, ca $2000 as compared to the usual $1300, and with fewer bills. How much am I willing to bet that I haven't forgotten all about this by then, or found some Very Good Reason why I simply must have something new and expensive for my humble self by then?

***

For the first time, our local magazine kiosk in Kristiansand (Norway) has displayed a magazine called Philosophy Now. Naturally I bought it. I am slightly relieved that real, paid philosophers seem to ramble nearly as much as I. Anthony Flew, a for me unknown atheist philosopher in the UK, tried to write an article on C.S. Lewis and ended up with commending Jehovahs Witnesses for their courage in the face of adversity, despite not having the pleasure to know that their enemies will suffer in Hell eternally...

You want to know what's wrong with philosophy these days? I'll tell you. It has spun off the interesting parts. Way back when, the ancient Greeks pondered the origin of matter and thought. Today the origin of matter is pondered by the cosmologists. They are looking billions of years back in time and across incomprehensibly vast distances, and treating the data with advanced mathematical structures. But still it is just a very advanced form of what the early Greek thinkers did: Look at nature and try to think up a theory that fits all the facts. And the origin of thought itself, of course, is the province of psychology and related sciences, such as neurobiology. Again, observation and thinking has grown so huge as to no longer fit under the umbrella of philosophy.

The reason why ethics still reside under philosophy, then, would presumably be that few people observe it, much less think about it! ;)

But sometimes you can find philosophy in the strangest places...

***

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared disturb the sound of silence.

(Paul Simon, The sound of silence, from The Graduate)