Monday 25 February 2019

My Beautiful House


As I was saying – live in someone else’s house for a while and your own will seem strange to you. Philosophers don’t like moving house. Where will they keep all the little knick knacks and keep sakes and the snow globes that keep their papers down. It’s so upsetting. Changing your mind is a chancy business but sometimes your house burns down and you have to move. Saving that catastrophe can we move out for a while and savour the different order of business? When we read novels we accept a voluntary precipitation into another sphere of being and it’s often good for us. I don’t mean the trifling scenarios of science fiction that conform to our prejudices but the mondo bizarro of Roskolnikov or K. The knife is passed across us and we fall into the torpor of the gazelle under the lion. Our sister is weighed against a grasping hag. Now is the time to be cold as ice, implacable.

Philosophers are like picky children. They don’t like the yoghurt with bits in it. Panpsychism is nonsense they mutter, there is no philosophy in the Upanishads and they kick the legs of the table. Well, I’ve got news for you, there’s a lot of hungry….

Entertain the very different. Find the thinker’s protophaenomenon and spin out like an excogitating mental spider the web of his thought.

The naturalist, who cannot or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand , as including them all in itself, and that it first makes all the others facts ; who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central experiment or observation ( what the Greeks would perhaps have called a protophaenomenon ) ; will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature.
(from Essays on Method by Coleridge)

Go East young philosopher where the spice of the utterly odd is to be found. When you come home again you may find yourself Once in a Lifetime:

You may ask yourself, what is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?
You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?

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