Falstaff: Yea, and so used it that; were it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent.– But. I prithee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king, and resolution thus fobbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father antick the law? Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.
Prince: No; thou shalt.
This site simply astounds me. First, it amazed me because occasionally the header text reads on it, “marriage is guaranteed.” That alone seems to make the site noteworthy.
But there’s so much more that amazes me about the entire thing. First, there’s the simple fact that cultures with arranged marriages seem to have happier marriages than we in the West do. Now, this could come from a thousand things: different temperaments, different expectations of marriage, different attitudes toward commitment, etc.
The thing seems worth debating though.
The “morbid melancholy,” which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner. While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. How wonderful, how unsearchable are the ways of God! Johnson, who was blest with all the powers of genius and understanding in a degree far above the ordinary state of human nature, was at the same time visited with a disorder so afflictive, that they who know it by dire experience, will not envy his exalted endowments. That it was, in some degree, occasioned by a defect in his nervous system, that inexplicable part of our frame, appears highly probable. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock.1
Tell me about it.
To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!1
The new Bane song is pretty damn good. From what I’ve been told the lyrics are:
Will not back down now,
I’ve got no place else to run and hide to,
Have come to far to buckle now.
Can’t lay this one down to the likes of you
And I don’t say that with some bullshit sense of pride.
But I need you to know that I’m not done screaming
About whether or not your foot
Has the right to be in some kid’s face.
And if that’s the case than I say arm us all
And we’ll get this asshole contest right under way
But it would be just like you to drag your keyboard to a gunfight
And so long after the smoke had cleared
I stood there all night if you had so much to say
Instead of running home lion tail between your legs
Crying about some little needle stuck in your paw
I don’t give a fuck if my words have grown old
I’ve never been so willing to see a relationship fray
I dont give a fuck how thin this ice has become
I’m stomping on it anyway.1
Oh, for those of you who care, I’ll be back in America for Hellfest at which I had better see Bane, considering their performance last year.
Lately, I’ve been debating undertaking the creation of an experiment in psychology full of open-source hacking fun. The project’s basic idea is this: apply evolutionary programming concepts and ideas from neural net design to a personals matching site. In short, making a match.com that’s intellectually exciting and potentially much more successful. Above all else, do it for fun and do it for free.
So who’s interested in hearing more? We’ll need a few hackers and at least some person willing to design a UI. We’ll also need weirdos like myself who are prepared to reduce love and everything else about human beings into a 32 bit value.
How much value is there in rereading books! I return to Lear again every year, often every month and rethink the entire work.
As a boy, I had a terror of the reaction to a moment of vulnerability in Lear leading to his violent outburts that destroyed him. Yet at that point I had never yet lived through such times and not yet seen how they would pass. Now I have lived them many times.
Or perhaps a more radical change is my attitude towards Cordelia with whom I saw so much similarity in myself as a boy. I felt that she truly was as Hegel thought the highest peak of humanity.
Now she seems merely a girl more given to principles than to emotions, unflinchingly dedicated to principles whose utlimate value is, at best, questionable.
Like Gandhi, I have gone from thinking him admirable to perhaps thinking him worse than the true demons - for a demon has none of the beguiling charm of the Mephistopheles who corrupts us.
The Hope Conspiracy deserves their reputation for being a great band. Any band with an ounce of good sense playing hardcore wins my affection.
Burned the years into ashen whispers.
This acrid smoke chokes my lungs.
So careless with friends we’re given;
So quick to reject forgiveness.
Suffering to claim back time.
And to think I believed in this.
Burning the years into ashen whispers.
Loving, crying, dying -
We play our parts: words, days, blood and tears
Shed upon the rooftops of this city.
Time and time again until we’re gone.
Until it’s over.
Portraits, scars and memories -
Keepsakes of what used to be my love
Bled across this infinite wire.
And what it meant: I wish you knew.
Bonds grow cold and time flies by.
Love and energy - it’s been wasted.
Does this mean anything to you?
Are you still confused?
All we do is build a wall between us.1
Why is it that the poets of the world have been, by and large, so painfully bland compared with Catullus and Heine? Why so lacking in that bitter, sarcasm without which I cannot conceive of beauty or true innocence of heart. In my mind, Heine and Catullus between them divide nearly all responsibility for all of the poetry I think divine. And I think this precisely because they are the only poets of life I know, the only poets of a bloody, hateful, lustful, loving life. They are men of this world and yet one imagines few men could have found the ways of men so painfully inadequate. Few men seem so admirable, so desperately striving for a perfection of character that humanity will perhaps never attain.
If you don’t know Heine, you should start with one of my favorite poems of all time, called Im Der Fremde:
Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.
Der Eichenbaum
Wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.
Es war ein Traum.Das küßte mich auf deutsch und sprach auf deutsch
(Man glaubt es kaum
Wie gut es klang) das Wort: “Ich liebe dich!”
Es war ein Traum.1
Any reading of Catullus simply should always begin with poem 87 because it is built around precisely the sort of last minute reversal of tone that chraracterizes the most beautiful works.
Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam
Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea est.
Nulla fides ullo fuit umquam foedere tanta,
Quanta in amore tuo ex parte reperta mea est.2
Tennyson said, in a poem I read for the first time because I suspected from the first stanza it would suit my mood,
A still small voice spake unto me,
‘Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be?’Then to the still small voice I said;
‘Let me not cast in endless shade
What is so wonderfully made.’1
As I read the poem, I immediately thought of “Sorrow Is A Sage” by Strongarm:
I hear a small voice inside me say:
“Grace grows in winter.”
How I long to believe that it speaks the truth.2
Once again the Florida lyricists seem to have a tendency to employ phrases remarkably close to pieces of classic poetry.