September 5~ 7, 2023

Author:

Who am I? That depends entirely upon what you think you are.

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At some point, silence became language. It itself was there first, but was only realized second. What punctures the featureless renders an intelligible medium. The rest is just stuff.

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History is woven through those personalities who sell the medium.

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I am not my memory; my memory is my host. I am not my name; my name is your usher in my theater.

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Language is the last to happen, but we all start from “there” and extend to “over there.” In reality there is a sequence of perspectives, each a mechanical overlay accounting for the “display” of consciousness. Everything happens here. We butterfly-wing it with analog devices, converting the invisible into the ”visible” … re-presentations.

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Obstacles are more likely to be erased by lack of incentive than swept aside with it.

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Resistance to satisfaction iconizes the object of adoration. Quick indulgence prefers forgetting secrets to remembering the sacred. Was it inhibition that made this excess respect?

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Science is the successful determination of a prior failure. If that is not optimistic, what is?

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The inability to admit to a lack of basis is not a loss when exposed, unless you’re an engineer. In which case, “What were you thinking?”

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You know you’re a parasite of the now when you try to do what time would otherwise already be doing for you.

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Listening to some atheists, it is Evil to believe in God. Of course, this is a rhetorical device, pulling their adversary’s own principles down the meat grinder; but the atheist, I promise you, indulges in the irony, which can only be from basis for assessing Evil.

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One can’t beg for confidence. Confidence is refusing to beg.

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Vice: how one copes with demands for conspicuous virtue.

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(… But which way is up?) Conscience can never get the best of you, unless you let it try.

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Self-Confidence Games: Half think that because they have no questions that they are not lost and that the other half are lost because they have unanswered questions.

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What is truth to strength? The wrong perspective, evidently.

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Thinking is like watching a movie. Thinking about thinking is like watching theater staff feed film into an antique projector. Few in the audience fully appreciate the contortions and bypasses necessary to a three-dimensional illusion from a two-dimensional medium, from a four-dimensional machinery.

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The pleasure of and while setting a goal is not concatenated along the steps to that goal. And even then, that first pleasure was in a moment of hypothetical revery. The goal itself will issue its own final judgement. Can you get past one or two steps where emotional support ends?

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The obstacle was getting past the wrath of the boss, a much smaller problem than the boss’s frustrating obstacle.

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Stoicism begins with the human need for a goal where all obvious goals are forbidden.

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Making an observation is like shaking one’s hand from pain. It is a return from a stretched dialectic, snapping what had once grasped the idea. One stares now at the knotted fist, with a shockingly different grip.

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History is the text that successfully navigates its readership.

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Craft fails because it is assertive. It deduces tumbler combinations for locks. But dull wittedness pauses and waits to see what will come out from behind the door. One is foresight, prediction. The other hindsight, history. One is a product of confidence; the other, of caution. “At some point,” one consoles oneself, “the issue will resolve itself” … till the thought occurs: this is defined well enough to be a new craft … a new, outermost grip over every other assumption.

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