> I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about getting
> the turntable.
The momentum – aka seemingly increased/increasing re-ality – of thoughts re-peated?
> Right now I am listening to The Smiths on this playlist
> and really enjoying it.
No wonder it's Wednesday, [and] I'm in love!
> Excerpts from Thomas Merton's “The Other Side Of
> Despair”
>
>> If in practice the function of organized religion turns
>> out to be nothing more than to justify and to canonize the
>> routines of mass society; if organized religion abdicates
>> its mission to disturb man in the depths of his conscience,
>> and seeks instead simply to “make converts” that will
>> smilingly adjust to the status quo, then it deserves the
>> most serious and uncompromising criticism.
Wow. And so applicable to online “institutions”, right down to single posts seeking “converts” (aka clickks/views) instead of “to disturb [readers] in the depths of [their] consciences”....
Ain't it amazing how asleep woke can be?
> Kierkegaard on being something
>
>> If you want to be well off and yet easily manage to
>> become something, then forget God, never let yourself
>> really become aware, never let it become really clear
>> to you that it is he who has created you from nothing;
>> proceed on the presupposition that a human being does not
>> have time to waste on keeping in mind the one to whom he
>> infinitely and unconditionally owes everything. ... Forget
>> it and be noisy along with the crowd, laugh or cry, be
>> busy from morning until night, be loved and respected and
>> esteemed as a friend, as a public official, as a king,
>> as a pallbearer. Above all be an earnest person by having
>> forgotten the one and only earnestness, to relate yourself
>> to God, to become nothing.
Oh, Søren! Must you so prophetically castigate the modern memetically murmuring masses?
> Have you ever observed how our mind reacts to the situation
> when we are uncomfortable or at the time when we feel about
> the person we are talking to seems more intelligent than
> us? We start to think about ourselves as not worthy to be
> extroverts or to share what we feel at that moment. The
> fear grows inside and outside we become the index of life
> that teaches us how to adapt.
Last night my partner and I were pondering related matters with respect to a “micro bookclub-ish” discussion we had the night before that on a section of a chapter of a book, noting that while we experienced standard “confirmationist” moments of agreement, we learned much more about our otherwise generally unrevealed biases in moments of disagreement/conflict – while, of course, straining to remain “civil”.
> The Smiths are up again. Never been a huge fan of them,
> but this playlist has made me a mini-fan. Good stuff!
I personally discovered them back in the late 1990s, and bought all their CDs available at that point.
<mental note to whip out “Wild Mood Swings” again, soon>