“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your weeping father to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was his beloved child remains with him in this world.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around.
According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”
—
Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral”
(Source: lonelyheartsdeathmetal)
❝For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travail that the day’s work may be done. Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas ‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious. But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
I am a lump of molecules currently arranged in the most energetically favourable conformation
but when I die I will be most energetically favourable as dust and dirt. Huh.
❝And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home
—
David Foster Wallace
Kafka asked his friend to burn all his writings, all unpublished, at his death. Talk about being tortured with the idea of self. Luckily for us the friend disobeyed. I wonder if Kafka would keep an emo Tumblr blog were he alive today
(Source: fuckyeahexistentialism)
What a delusion, this belief that we have control over anything because we stick labels on them and place them in cages. Do I have to remind myself how small we are
I cling to the outsides of your words
and your words became flesh
I want you because that’s how the emotional brain functions. And I have doubts because my cognitive brain knows better. Nothing like the cold knife of definitions to pain and operate on my sanity
I can’t remember the day it happened, that I reached this crossing. Its a place you hear about since youth and you always knew it was coming; but nothing can prepare for your arrival until you have arrived. So I had just been walking along for years upon years and I suddenly find myself looking across the chasm And its either crossing or staying with all you’ve ever known So of course you cross And the way you see things can never be the same again
If its any comfort to others who also love to write but have no confidence in their writing, great American wordsmiths like Steinbeck and Vonnegut wrote their first pieces with such clumsiness that I feel half decent about my own prose.
Steinbeck used to write short stories for ‘The Housewife’s Companion’ magazine.
How very funny that these constrictions of the throat and the pinched air from the lungs make this sound “aie luv yoo” (say it ten times slow, ten times fast, ten times with meaning and ten times without) and this wave of sound An energy Powers through the ears and through the mind and to the heart And we all know what that power can do, It can kill a man and make a man and everything in between.
This was on my mind when I decided against art school ↘
Its almost like you have to fling yourself into adverse situations and create mental conflict and suffering on purpose to create raw art. Products for ambition and money appear attractive but have nothing honest to say. I also know art is everywhere in me. I have no fear of losing it.
Anyway that’s just part of my justification for making myself endure a couple of years of organic chemistry, amongst other things. I tell myself that nothing is a mistake if you learn from it and I chose to believe it and so I have no regrets.
But. I have moved on now to a different focus in my academic studies and have morphed (yeah, like butterflies) into a passionate nerd. I’ll even present you with a nerdy blog soon. BE EXCITED
