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Day 2410, on the stage.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book III

177 Learning solitude. – 0 you poor devils in the great cities of world politics, you gifted young men tormented by ambition who consider it your duty to pass some comment on everything that happens- and there is always something happening! Who when they raise the dust in this way think they are the chariot of history! Who, because they are always on the alert, always on the lookout for the moment when they can put their word in, lose all genuine productivity! However much they may desire to do great work, the profound speechlessness of pregnancy never comes to them! The event of the day drives them before it like chaff, while they think they are driving the event – poor devils! – If one wants to represent a hero on the stage one must not think of making one of the chorus, indeed one must not even know how to make one of the chorus.

Day 2408, Strange.

Daily picture, The stranger

The stranger I work with questioned me after discovering that life, according to me, has no purpose. “So life has no meaning, you say. And you come to this conclusion through philosophy? So if you look for meaning in life, it is better not to do philosophy?”

I replied. “Well, I said that life has no purpose in the sense that there is no goal where we have to work to like a heaven or an endpoint in our evolution. In general, life also has no meaning, but it is easier to give your life or a period of your life a meaning. A good meaning for you might be razing a family, it’s something that comes naturally and doesn’t need much debating, but it is harder to find the purpose for raising a family. And indeed, philosophy has helped me reach this insight. It did not tell me literally what to think; it more or less made the thoughts I already had more explicit. Doing philosophy is like doing a sport or playing an instrument. The more you do it, the better you can get at it, even if you have little talent. Everybody can do philosophy in the way we can all play football or the piano, but if you practice it, you will get better at it.

The stranger asked, “so you think you understand life better than me because you read a couple of books?”

Me, “ I don’t know if I understand it better, and I think the most significant difference between you and me is that I can probably talk more elaborately about what I believe. Maybe you have a better gut feeling, but you said earlier that what you think hasn’t changed for years, and most of it comes from your upbringing. You have been standing still and haven’t played, so to say”

The stranger asked, “but what is wrong with that?”

To be continued…

Day 2398, dying thoughts.

Daily picture, Haiku, Poetry 

A kernel of truth
at the end of dying thoughts
a prolongation 

Nochrisis

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book 1

66 Capacity for visions. –Throughout the whole Middle Ages, the actual and decisive sign of the highest humanity was that one was capable of visions – that is to say, of a profound mental disturbance! And the objective of medieval prescriptions for the life of all higher natures (thereligiosi) was at bottom to make one capable of visions! It is thus no wonder that an over-estimation of the half-mad, the fantastic, the fanatical- of so-called men of genius- should have spilled over into our time; ‘they have seen things that others do not see’ – precisely! and this should make us cautious towards them, not credulous!

Read more here: https://nochrisis.blog/morgenrote/

Day 2397, illusory.

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Definition of ’anthropomorphize’

anthropomorphize

in British English

[ an-thruh-puh-mawr-fahyz ]

verb (used with or without object), an·thro·po·mor·phized, an·thro·po·mor·phiz·ing.

Anthropomorphizing is the human tendency to see the illusory or theoretical human-behavior and qualities in humans*, animals, and other objects.

*a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens)

Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 94th Edition. Copyright © 2089 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights free.

Day 2395, lost cells.

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I opened Lightroom today, which is my photo editing and organizing program, and I clicked by accident on the main folder; it showed me thumbnails of all the photos on my computer. I immediately saw my face and clicked on it to enlarge it. It is one of the scans of an old slide, probably from around 1996.

I find it a shame that you (or maybe it’s just me) can never look at yourself like you look at a stranger. If I meet someone for the first time, I will always get some impression of who this person is, and the longer we interact, the more detailed that mental picture becomes. It is a little bit more difficult if you only see the person in a photo, but even then, you could get some information out of it, even if it is just the type of cloth they wear or the setting they are in, it all combined tells you something.

As a good skeptic, I don’t attach too much value to what my first impression tells me, but it is at least something. If I look at myself in the mirror or at this picture from 25 years ago, I get nothing. Meeting myself would be nice, but that’s not possible yet; only on video can I see myself moving around and interacting with other people.

It is just something I find curious, and I wonder if it is just me or if this is normal. I think it has something to do with what I think about myself. In this picture, I see myself from 25 years ago, and I learned a few things in the meantime, but… I also know that what we think or feel about ourselves often has little to do with what others think or “feel” about us. There might be some truth in both observations*, but maybe, that what I think about myself conflicts with what the person on the photo shows me, which is why I have a hard time seeing anything when I stare into those eyes. As if I deny my past self.

I have to say that the longer I look at the picture, the more I see, so it is time to stop because all the staring and thinking dilute my first, perhaps purer, impression of what I wanted to write about today. You could say that I start to project what I might want to see onto the person in that old picture, something we humans are good at. Being real to yourself is hard

*Some people see your personality as not fixed but something that is constantly in motion. Every little turn or event changes you, even if it is just in the slightest. You are not the same as who you were yesterday, let alone 25 years ago. You can take this also literally, there is not one molecule in me that was also there in 1996. In that sense, I am now a whole other person, and only my copies of the original DNA know how to keep the whole façade intact, though I don’t understand why my DNA finds it necessary to take away some of my hair.

Day 2394, old door.

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Part of my work is restoring old doors, and today I started with this door. This is an old door that is now in use as an emergency exit that also sometimes gets used for special occasions. It is in the main Library here in Trondheim, and the head historian of Trondheim told me today that she believes it was already part of the building before it got renovated in 1831. The door has been restored before, probably in the seventies, but the original fittings are still there, and only parts of the wooden construction (the lock stile) are relatively new.  

The hinges are old, they are fitted in such a way that we would damage the door if we try to remove them, so we leave them. It is pretty incredible that these old hinges are still doing their work after almost 200 years; modern hinges that are screwed to the doors of today will probably never last that long.

Another point that shows the craftsmanship used in making these old doors is that most of my job will be replacing parts of the wood used in the restoration they did 50 years ago. You have to understand that it is not only the carpenter’s work that makes these doors last but also the people that sell the wood. They understood what kind of wood was needed for making a quality door and were in contact with the right people that could deliver the right kind of wood for the job. In short, the whole ecosystem was “made” for quality, not quantity. We, of course, don’t know what happened to all the other old doors that are long gone; we only see the ones that lasted but still.

Doors like these are the reason that I  leaned towards restoring “old stuff.” It never felt right making more new things, and I like all the stories attached to all those old boats I helped restore, a door like this also has many stories: who all have opened this door, for instance, and what was their mood going in or getting out?