August 22, 2007

• Today

  The big waterfowl are leaving.  I have been listening to cranes today, flying over, headed south.  Weather for three days has varied from drizzle to downpour, with periods of mist and fog in between.  I will wait a few days, hoping for sunshine, before attempting to work on the roof in the rain.

  I am pleased that slave_slutangel brought the word, “fantasy,” into the discussion of romance and male-female relations.  I think that “fantasy” is the most appropriate word to follow the word, “romantic,” but it hadn’t occurred to me in that context yesterday.

  i am one of those romantics but i also believe in compatibility of
  chemical responses between me and my mate. So in a sense i do have the
  fairy tale life with reality of love between us. It is nice to be in
  different spots at the same time and at times the fantasy part outweighs
  the reality part…. and that is good too because i know that in
  reality it is just as good as the fantasy part… switching always
  going back and forth and always growing ….

  To me, that sounds like a healthy attitude, one that, if I understand her correctly, I share.  People who don’t have fantasies are missing a piece of their consciousness.  The ones who seem to me to be nuts, and dangerous in the aggregate to whatever extent the culture is influenced by them, are those who feel threatened by reality and deny it, who guard their fantasies, believing in them despite evidence to the contrary, and trying to make them their reality.

  The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.  –Albert Einstein

  I was googling around this morning, trying to find a particular quotation whose author I didn’t remember, the words of which I had misremembered.  It took a while, and the search took me off on several delightful side trips on one of which fantasy came up again.  I looked up the definition of “fantasy.”

  • imagination unrestricted by reality; “a schoolgirl fantasy”

  • fiction with a large amount of imagination in it; “she made a lot of money writing romantic fantasies”

  • indulge in fantasies; “he is fantasizing when he says he plans to start his own company”

  • illusion: something many people believe that is false; “they have the fantasy that I am very wealthy”

  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

  In
  literature, fantasy is a form of speculative fiction in which physical
  laws differ from our own through a reason for which no scientific
  explanation is offered, or which take place a world wholly different
  from our own. In the context of speculative fiction, if science fiction
  is considered a genre of what could be, and alternate history a genre
  of what might have been, fantasy is the genre of what is (or was) not.
  …
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy

  —-A
  fantasy is a situation imagined by an individual or group, which does
  not correspond with reality but expresses certain desires or aims of
  its creator. Fantasies typically involve situations which are
  impossible (such as the existence of magic powers) or highly unlikely
  (such as world peace). Fantasies can also be sexual in nature.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_(psychology)

  Eventually, I did find that quote I had been seeking:

  Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and possess elevation. They rise up and fall down again, and this is no mean pastime, nor unpleasant to behold.
    –Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

  Kierkegaard also said:

  Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

  Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.

  To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

  The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

  The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

  People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

  Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.

  Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

  Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

  Another nineteenth century philosopher said:

  A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

  All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

  And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

  At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

  Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

  Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

  Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

  Fear is the mother of morality.

  Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

  I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

  Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

  Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

  Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

  Do you know who said those things?  If those quotes didn’t give it away, the next two probably will.

  That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

  Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

  

  • 4:55 pm
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