2012 — 10 November: Saturday
Having decided1 to go for another walk today, I'm hoping the drizzle holds off for the next few hours. I'll be quite content to have my next shower after I return, thanks, Mother Nature.
It's 09:14 and Brian Matthew is in fine form with his "Sounds of the 60s". There's a breakfast to be made, a lunch to be packed, and some clothes and boots to be found...
Strange but true...
It's the end of Year Five as a widower after today. Amazing (and I still don't mean that in a good way) but it seems that if you keep on breathing in and out, and keep on putting one foot in front of the other, you do manage to end up further along Life's Little Highway.
I would have discussed the matter with Christa, but she's been unaccountably detained somewhere — or somewhen — else... I re-watched and re-enjoyed that neat little comedy FAQ about time travel yesterday evening :-)
I'm not a Buddhist2 but I was pleased to read what the good Prof Barash had to say about it, and Zen, and ecology. Source and snippet:
The touchstone, instead, is a Buddhist idea that is among the most difficult for Westerners to accept: the concept of anatman, or "no-self". Let's be clear: Buddhists do not claim that
people do not exist...
However, for Buddhists there is no self in the deeper sense that no one exists as a singular, permanent structure distinct and isolated in any meaningful way from the rest of the world. This is
entirely in line with an evolutionary and ecological approach to our origins and our embeddedness in natural processes...
For Buddhists and ecologists alike, we are all created from spare parts scavenged from the same cosmic junk-heap, from which "our" component atoms and molecules are on temporary loan, and to which
they will eventually be recycled.
It's a view that fits neatly with the Robert Persig quotation I noted a while back in an Observer interview conducted by Tim Adams:
It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness ... If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it no one knows it is there... Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even... (Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?)
[Pause]
Just returned, having worked up a reasonable appetite (I didn't bother to make/take a packed lunch), to find one of those "While you were out..." cards from Mr Postie too late for his Saturday opening hours, so that's another task for Monday. Meanwhile, showered and late-light-lunched, I can now resume reading about the new biography of J Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk.
Class dismissed!
The closing snippet from what turned out to be a "proper" book review:
Monk recalls meeting the philosopher Karl Popper with a view to writing his biography. "We were at cross purposes. He thought I was there to see if I was sufficiently Popperian to write his life. I was there to find out if he had led a sufficiently interesting life." Unfortunately, neither was the case.
Perhaps he should tackle Thomas Kuhn? Philosophers who fling heavy glass ashtrays at 'dissident' students are interesting, surely?