Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glace given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
The bald Caucasian came back. His facial expression slowly changed into a combination of nostalgia, rhetoric, and calmness. He said the Fukanese run Chinatown now. He said he sold fireworks since he was 11. He said everyone used to eat well in Chinatown. He said the Fukanese fucked up Chinatown. He asked me what part of China I was from. I said I was from Taiwan. “You know that little island off China?” I said. “I know,” he said. “I am geographically sound.”
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice. All they’re interested in is turning out toenails—semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against—whom? Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten pointless projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips of a Solingen. By the ninetieth twilit day of their prenatal confinement, my toes had cranked up that extraordinary factory. And when I am tucked away in Recoleta, in an ash-colored house bedecked with dry flowers and amulets, they will still be at their stubborn work, until corruption at last slows them—them and the beard upon my cheeks.
It used to be considered important to examine, for each consequence of the axiom of choice, the extent to which the axiom is needed in the proof of the consequence. An alternative proof without the axiom of choice spelled victory; a converse proof, showing that the consequence is equivalent to the axiom of choice … meant honorable defeat. Anything in between was considered exasperating.
Until lately the best thing that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.
[Quoting a speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.]
This is not a Zen koan. There are actually fields and fields of fish beside the road that leads to Korea’s oldest ski slope, YongPyong.
… The fish, he says, are carted here from the docks to cure in the brutal winds that right now are blowing down from Siberia. “Specialty of the region,” he says. The fish? I wonder. The wind? Outside, a million pairs of shriveling eyes stare up at the quilted sky. The air smells of snowflakes and low tide on a hot day. This combination strikes me as unpropitious.
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