Photons are the lightest things in the universe. And when heavy metals are created in the collision of dark stars gravity waves ripple through space-time.

πάθει μάθος

The passion of math is to suffer and learn.

Your subjective passions shape your desires. They are not objective reasons to hold your beliefs. There is a passion to seek a reason. But the passion is not itself a reason. Nor does the passion invalidate the reason once it's found.

The right to enjoy bourgeois pleasures is predicated on the obligation to maintain our institutions. This, perhaps more than anything else, explains the crippling, joyless guilt of the middle class.

There is something unsettling about hearing the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy announce that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature will be given to Kazuo Ishiguro for "uncover[ing] the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". After all, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year was given to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Gravity waves presumably exist.

Has the Swedish Academy declared my sense of connection with the world illusory? Has Kazuo Ishiguro proved the existence of an abyss beneath my being? Has he discovered my nothingness?

The image is
thought by the mind,
felt in the heart.

The water is still and dark.

The hand passes
through the surface
as the eye dwells
on the appearance.

The water is shimmering and wet.

Foundations

Beneath an ethical life,
the daily grind.

Beneath the grind,
political struggle.

Beneath the struggle,
a killing field.

As you are distressed
by my reasons,
I am confused
by your passions.

_____
Notes:

Distress is a decomposition of passion. Confusion is a decomposition of reason.

Reason finds its composure by distinguishing things clearly from each other. Passion finds its composure in our intense identification with each other as people.

To distress is to "draw apart" to the point of suffering. To confuse is to "pour together" insufferably.

Composure, then, is a very precise kind of suffering. It is where things are kept apart despite our passions, and where people are kept together despite our reasons. It finds a balance of clarity and intensity.

Disobeying Hitler is not a way of obeying your muse.

Misunderstanding Heidegger is not a way of understanding your existence.

Use philosophy
to locate your concepts
and hone your intuitions.

Use poetry
to temper your emotions
and gauge your institutions.

Use language
to civilize
your intuitions,
to humanize
your institutions.

Theme and Craft

from Greek thema "a proposition,
subject, deposit," literally "something set down,"

German Kraft "strength, skill" ...
Sense expanded in Old English to include "skill, dexterity; art, science, talent"
... also "something built or made."

The proximity of a thought.
The duration of a feeling.