Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Bembo Davies's avatar

Illich wrote in Tools for C.: that if you travel faster than by mule or a third world bus, you cannot possibly take your soul along with you. But you know this.

Expand full comment
James R. Martin's avatar

I'm researching for the writing of my own first book. The book is on the topic of knowing (usually called 'knowledge' -- the noun rather than the verb). I'm interested in the verb -- in knowing as a process in which we're at any moment in its present moment. The moment passes, it moves on... or does it? Do we let it move on fully as needed? Anyway, I'm exploring knowing in relation to thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining -- and how to go about wedding these to one another so they work together in harmony. This, I think, would bring about another world! Or it could.

Anyway, while researching, Dear Dougald, I chanced upon this quote which resonates with your writing and thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining.

*****

“Our age,” says Kierkegaard, “will remind one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gave it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic—tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.” 2 Beckett’s works, at once tragic and comic in just this sense, are indeed works of and for our time.”

― David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning

from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15732798.David_Michael_Kleinberg_Levin

Also similarly salient to your work, Dougald:

“In the clearing, world and earth are in interaction: earth is the ground on which the world is built, and world is that within which the earth is given its meaning as grounding. Earth and world are in incessant, endless strife, the earth ever reclaiming for itself, reducing to earth, what the world builds upon it, whereas the world struggles with the earth, and against the earth, to make it serve human purposes. But it is only in the world that the earth receives meaning; and it is only in relation to the earth that we can fully understand not only the fragility and power of our world but also the frightening vulnerability of our grounding and building on the earth—and can harvest some meaning in our fated mortality.”

― David Kleinberg-Levin, Heidegger's Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction

Expand full comment
13 more comments...

No posts