Author: Christiaan van Gaal

Day 2099, thin ice?

Day's pictures

I had this picture of ice on a lake and the bed underneath, and both are not in focus, but it leaves enough to my imagination. I wanted to write something clever about it, but I lost my appetite. I just read a news article about some right-wing nutcases in America with a picture of four guys fully dressed in army fatigues and weapons everywhere. I look at their faces, and I just don’t understand these people; they obviously take themselves really serious.  Personally, I believe that you always have to be critical of the answers you give yourself and the ones others give you. Doubt is not easy, but a militiaman or anti-vaxxer will have never take their stance if they question themselves.

There are billions of opinions, and my only conclusion out of that is that they cannot all be true. Claiming that yours is true is not enough; even a majority can be wrong. God and his claims are also not enough; there are thousands of God’s and even more religions.

For the same reason that we all agree that one plus one is two, we should also search for other truths that fit in that same category. Think about all your opinions; could they be universal, or are they just particular to your situation?

Day 2098, little stone.

Day's pictures

There is a crack in my window, and I know it distorts my view when looking outside, and some warmth is escaping through the tiny hole. On the other hand, I always forget to ventilate enough when warming the house with a fire, and when I want to look outside, I have many other windows to look through undisturbed. The crack should off course, not be there; it’s not meant to be like that. But I also like the crack and the form it took after the impact from the little rock I threw to get your attention; it’s a memory, one I will never forget, with or without the crack. I like the crack.

Day 2097, abandoned.

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

The gay Science

Book Four: St. Januarius

331- Better deaf than deafened – Formerly one wanted to be talked about; that is no longer enough, since the market has grown too large – only a shout will do. As a result, even good voices shout themselves down, and the best goods are offered by hoarse voices; without the vendors’ cry and hoarseness there is no longer any genius. That is, to be sure, a bad epoch for a thinker; he must learn how to find his own quietude even between two noises, and pretend he is deaf until he really is. As long as he has not learned this, he runs the risk of going to pieces from impatience and headaches.

Day 2094, On the other side.

Day's pictures

Today I was in the hospital for a minor operation; I had a hernia in the groin. It was the first time for me to be in a hospital for myself and not for a visit. Like I approach most things in life, I was quite interested in the process. It was not that interesting or exhilarating looking back, but I remember two things the most: when I took a selfie for my family, I saw myself in the picture as an old guy in a hospital. Both things are, of course, through, but it is the instant association with hospitals and sickness when you see these “clothes” on you. Seeing myself like this made it immediately different from a routine visit to the doctor or dentist. It was not stressful; it just made it more official and serious than the feeling I had when I went into it, just an observation. Maybe we could have some fancier and more colorful clothes next time, and all the patients wear a baseball cap with a smile on it, so everybody still knows who’s who, just a little bit more joy and colors.

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Day 2092, history

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

Untimely Meditations

On the uses and disadvantages of history for life

Excerpt of part 3

History thus belongs in the second place to him who preserves and reveres – to him who looks back to whence he has come, to where he came into being, with love and loyalty; with this piety he as it were gives thanks for his existence. By tending with care that which has existed from of old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence – and thus he serves life…

…Sometimes this clinging to one’s own environment and companions, one’s own toilsome customs, one’s own bare mountainside, looks like obstinacy and ignorance -yet it is a very salutary ignorance and one most calculated to further the interests of the community: a fact of which anyone must be aware who knows the dreadful consequences of the desire for expeditions and adventures, especially when it seizes whole hordes of nations, and who has seen from close up the condition a nation gets into when it has ceased to be faithful to its own origins and is given over to a restless, cosmopolitan hunting after new and ever newer things. The feeling antithetical to this, the contentment of the tree in its roots, the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one’s existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified – it is this which is today usually designated as the real sense of history…

…The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate…

Day 2091, afar.

Day's pictures, Poetry

I stand afar

in front of these massive

black

ancient rocks

~

formed a billion years ago

it’s not their size

that makes me feel small

~

when it sheds its next rock

a cliff

into the valley below

loosened by cold and sun

~

we might all be long

gone

~

we are not even a cliff

an outlook

we are like the snow

that fell to low

on its slope