Day 3834, all this.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

560 What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves – indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in completefully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?

Day 3828, good for us.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry

In my mind
most bridges can either open
or are high enough to let good ideas through


but looking around me
most people seem to live
where no ideas float
or bridges are too low
unable to open

Some of my notes from today that somehow belong together. 

We live in a strange world. For 2000 years, the Christian churches have tried to sell their story, backed by mighty institutions, governments, and armies that did their bidding, and still most people don’t believe their story, while the rest made it into one of their own. And what about the real thinkers, the philosophers? Yes, they have their institutes, the universities that are dwindling away. Their truths come closer to what that might be, but who still believes them these days?

Once, we apes just lived our lives, and from child to child we learned our place. Not only where we were, but also what these hands can do and who the others are. We started to see the world and became aware that we did. We became aware of our thoughts, not in words but in emotions, and somehow connected them to our drives. We lived, as a species, much longer with our consciousness expressed through emotions, drives, and feelings than with the words we now often misconstrue for our consciousness.

We often know what is good for us. That’s what you tell yourself, but these little words are no match for the part of us that is much older, has had much more practice, and is also cemented much deeper in society at large. We vote for the baboon who ruins our country because it didn’t speak with words, but with emotions.

Some people are ruled more by their words than by their emotions, even if only slightly. Or their emotions better understand the blindness of their goals and also remember that no one is the same person in the morning or evening or on a Wednesday as on a Sunday.

All of this goes on between our two ears, and no matter what story we hear and feel, it is our story, and for some reason it seems to be taken for real. I do believe that there are ways to live a life where you believe less of what you feel and think. The reason why I think that is, is because we do make progress living together as 8 billion egocentric prisoners on a big world but so close together.

Day 3827, and.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

550 Knowledge and beauty. – If, as they still do, people as it were reserve their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling, we ought not to wonder if the opposite of imagination and dissembling makes them feel cold and disconsolate. The delight produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge, which science as it is now bestows so abundantly and already upon so many – this delight is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depths of appearance. These believe reality is ugly: but they do not reflect that knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful, nor that he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything ‘beautiful in itself? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things- may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition! In the meantime let us recall an experience of olden time: two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods
of the highest empyrean: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind (not, that is to say, in ‘intuition’, as German theologians and semi-theologians do; not in visions, as mystics do; and likewise not in creating, as all practical people do). Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion: how they must all have enjoyed knowledge! And what a danger their honesty faced of becoming a panegyrist of things! –