THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
All this talk of
man surviving in his children or in his works or in the
universal consciousness is but vague verbiage which
satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity
and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain
cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great
talent or what we call great talent and yet be stupid as
regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have
been instances.
These
clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say
that it is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or
to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to
a man whose leg has had to be amputated that it does not
help him at all to think about it. And we all lack
something; only some of us feel the lack and others do
not. Or they pretend not to feel the lack, and then they
are hypocrites.
A pedant who
beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him,
"Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails
nothing?" And the sage answered him, "Precisely
for that reason—because it does not avail." It is
manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the
alleviation of distress; but the deep sense of Solon's
reply to the impertinent questioner is plainly seen. And I
am convinced that we should solve many things if we all
went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which
perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and
joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the
heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God
should hear us not; but He would hear us. The chiefest
sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go
to weep in common. A miserere sung in common by a
multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a
philosophy. It is not enough to cure the plague: we must
learn to weep for it. Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps
that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.
There is something
which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic
sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of
life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more
or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense
may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual
men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not so much
flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards,
as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness—dyspepsia, for example; but at other times it is
constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as we shall
see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy.
Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health,
nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by
nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man,
of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the
ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a
disease.
—Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic
Sense Of Life
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.59 pm, 31 July 2006►
MORE WHEN DRINKING DRIVERS ATTACK!
My link to ICBC's
CounterAttack "Walking" ad got a gratifying
response. If you haven't viddied it yet, you really
should; it's the funniest use of obviously fake violence
since SCTV. But wait, there's more! "Walking"
is one of three new tut-tuts -- sorry, "hard-hitting
CounterAttack ads" -- that began airing last month. According
to ICBC:
The target audience for the new
ad campaign is males aged 21 to 35 years old. The
hard-line approach to the messaging and a more visceral
experience are aimed at changing the social behaviour of
this target group, who traditionally are more prone to
take risks while driving.
According to ICBC focus testing
with this target audience, messages based in reality with
real victims was [sic] preferred.
Waaalll, judge for yourselves, but I was once a young
male aged 21 to 35 years old, and, unless this cohort has
changed a great deal in the last generation, its reaction
to "Curve"
and "Mini
Van" is likely to be fists pumped in
the air. Last time I checked, men (and especially young
men) don't like being scolded by women, and so seeing
these harridans being rewarded for their whining by being
pulverized will be especially gratifying.
Besides, how stupid does does a (non-drunk) female have to
be to get in a car driven by drunk driver and then proceed
to bait him ceaselessly?
I must point out, however, that CounterAttack's bathos
is directed not against "drunk driving" but
against "drinking and driving" (which is not
quite the same thing) and that its planted axiom is
straight out of the MADD
Canada playbook:
Driving while under the
influence of alcohol or other drugs is a terrible crime
that touches all of our lives and it is an irresponsible,
dangerous and intolerable act.
Every claim in the above statement is demonstrably
false. MADD should drop the pretence, ignore the middleman
(the drinking driver) and go back to busting
up saloons and chopping
down apple trees.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.51 pm, 31 July 2006►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
"But how can I say that
this dress makes me look fat?" she had patiently
asked him. "How can I know? How does anyone know? If
it's something that fills you out, that gives no place for
any other thought, something that rolls you out like a --
like a fat machine so there's nothing left of you, no
wish, no sense, then this dress makes me look fat, but it
doesn't make me happy, it's like doom, like Krispy Kreme
icing melting into eternity and I don't want to lose
myself in the gooey goodness -- I don't, Andy, I don't.
How do I know this dress is making me look fat? It
couldn't be making me look fat, darling, to make me so
lost, so lonely, so corpulent, so blind and deaf. I can't
see St. Thomas' spire -- I can't see trees in the park or
the sky, I can’t see my feet -- I can't read -- I can't
hear Tony playing, for it’s everywhere, all about me. Is
that my dress making me look fat? Isn't there some way of
a dress making one look fat and being oneself too? I don't
like to be so lost, so drowned, so hippy -- no, darling,
if this is making me look fat, then I don't want it, I
don't like it, I'm afraid."
-- Katie Hawthorne, Continued On Page 94
Hawthorne: Nothing in her appearance suggested a master
of prose
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.30 pm, 20 July 2006►
DRINKING AND DRIVING IS
HILARIOUS
Hey man, don't hate the player, hate the game -- in
this case, the Insurance
Corporation of British Columbia's.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.40 pm, 20 July 2006►
