Erich Fromm

Each step is a passage to safety. One can't step on the grass. One repeatedly passes over the danger to safety. There are endless wrong directions one could take. Only a few correct ones. And one must myopically focus on one's feet. This path is the correct way, picked out by the mysterious wise ones who have long since passed. This is the way through the chaos, through the meaningless.

22 steps from the driveway to the back deck. To where else can paths lead? It's the trip more than the destination that really matters. Perhaps a circle.

Met my cello teacher at violin shop in Pittsburgh. She seems really really nice. Not even slightly pretentious/snobby which was the primary worry. I suppose also I remember quite a few assholes in the past with regards to playing trumpet in a band and trying a few piano lessons. She doesn't seem like them at all. She spent more than an hour playing cellos/bows ranging in price from 1,500 dollars to 25,000 and 150 dollars to 2,500. I purchased one of each for 2,000 and 500. The 25,000 dollar cello sounded roughly 10% better or so...

It's a fun instrument IMO. But I suck. Can't do vibrato even yet. And wander around inbetween notes. Why no markings at all on the fingerboard? Just a few even to keep track of where one is....? Why not?

I think though my 30 dollar wind chime makes a better pure tone. Wondering if I could find a way to get it to play any frequency (within a given range) like a cello can do. Vibrato in particular, which is one of the really nice things about bow instruments. Makes a huge difference.

In scientific papers and textbooks there is the concept of being 'elegant'. This means that as you derive an equation, replacing terms, simplyfying, etc, you use as few steps as possible. And often simply skip a bunch of steps in between each equation you put down, without explaining how you got from equation 1 to 2 to 3, etc. This is elegance and it's done to make the author look intelligent, with the unfortunate result that the paper reads like gibberish to the majority of readers; not that the readers admit this, the author writes borderline gibberish to look intelligent and the readers pretend to easily understand it for the same reason.

The idea of course leaks over into textbooks also. And this idea goes beyond elegant derivations of course. In philosophy for example one must also be right on the edge of incomprehensible or they simply won't be taken seriously.

And so the selfish interest of one's intellectual reputation to a large extent trumps the concern of successfully transmitting knowledge to others.

I recall a devil I knew. The head of his department. Had his name on over 200 papers. The most important concerning an aerosl focuser of great use in nanotechnology. Incredibly simplistic idea actually. Much like my impacter but even more crude at heart. The papers published concerning it? Absolute gibberish. To the point that I'm sure the majority of people (in the profession) could not even make any sense of what the device actually was.

I recall my MS advisor. A total fraud in that he was simply utterly clueless and his main goal each day consisted of trying to conceal this fact. Something similar goes on for most of them to varying extents, although he was an extreme example. Did he feel shame? I don't think so. The unspoken (unthought) rule was that a fake facade was an essential part of one's work.

And who actually really wants to be a part of such things?

Perhaps it plays a role in so many PhDers from the third world. The idiotic usual explanation is that Americans don't have as good an education system. The reality is mainly that graduate students are treated horribly. People don't actually want to be 30 years old and still with no permanent job, working long hours, making hardly any money, etc. Someone from a third world country that has a life expectancy decades less is far more likely to put up with such things in order to try to escape their home country. But perhaps also the above plays a role. The politics. The dishonesty. It's everywhere of course. But the more education, the worse it is.

As to the idea that our education system is inferior, the actual (unspoken) purpose though of our education system is that of a holding pen for a surplus work force. With our current technology we simply don't need everyone working about as much as we can stand. So, of course, instead of a shorter work week, unemployment increases and youth spend longer and longer in school, getting their PhD's etc in making cheeseburgers (in effect).

It's never admitted that it's just a holding pen. Some place to put them instead of just having free time. It can't actually be reformed because that's all it really is. And we won't admit what it actually is.

Yet we're told we must reform our education system (our holding pen for the surplus workforce) to compete in science and technology with all the foreign people (the desperately poor whom are willing to put up with just about anything) who come to America for PhDs.

"Don't be afraid, sir. I don't like unnecessary truths. An unnecessary truth is the stupidest thing I know. For instance that we will die. Or that this world is rotten. As though we did not know all this. Do you know them, those men who heroically enter the stage to exclaim: This world is rotten! The public applauds but Jakub is not interested. Jakub knew this two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred years before them, so while they are exclaiming that the world is rotten he is trying invent for his master a few women with very large bottoms, the way his master likes it..." Life is repetition. Everything has been here before. "The one above (i.e. God) who has written all this repeated himself an awful lot, and since he has done so, he has probably been making fun of us..."

Life being a giant joke, perpetrated on members of the human race, is the main theme of Kundera's perhaps most profound novel Žert (1967)....

...There is no point in trying to revenge oneself. "Everything will be forgotten. There will never be any redress for anything."

The most traumatic experience of Ludvík Jahn is the realisation that his closest friends did not hesitate to vote for his expulsion from the Party because the Party had commanded them to do so. In a similar incident, the soldiers in the penal unit Ludvík served in ruthlessly subject an innocent individual to undeserved torment. Whenever Ludvík finds himself in a group of people, he always wonders how many of them would be willing to send their fellow mortals to death, only because the collective has demanded this....

...Kitsch is a beautiful lie, which hides all the negative aspects of life and deliberately ignores the existence of death....

..The starting point is a debate about the meaning of hedonism. Pleasure is defined, in the words of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, as absence of suffering. In the past, the notion of sensuality was associated with slowness. The slower one acts, the greater is the intensity of memory. The present-day obssession with speed is for Kundera an epitome of superficiality and emptiness. Kundera intensifies his criticism of contemporary Western civilisation which is manipulative, empty, without knowledge and without wisdom. The protagonists whom he analyses are spoilt, vainglorious and pretentious. Kundera contrasts their attitudes and their perceptions of reality and creates a grotesque image of the contemporary world...

... When Milan Kundera was young, like many of his young compatriots, he fell into the trap of destructive ideology. It took him almost twenty years to free himself from its constraints. The deep trauma taught him to assume a sceptically critical attitude towards reality. It taught him how important pluralism is. It made him realise that man is infinitely fallible and that he/she does not understand his environment.

Once Kundera left Czechoslovakia for the West, he was able to use the critical faculties he gained as a result of his traumatic encounter with communism, in order to compare and contrast the West European and the Central European experience in such a was as to uniquely elucidate important aspects of man's contemporary existence.

First of all Kundera has highlighted the contemporary crisis of language, a crisis of meaning and a crisis of communication. His novels are novels about various forms of delusion.

Feeling strong love for J, cats, and even springtime. At the point of loving spring a sneer comes up maybe like Kundera's hypertrophied soul. But such love is at the least extremely close to irrelevant to obtaining... whatever it is that I instead want to obtain. Immortality Kundera calls it. Not so sure it's that at all.

With 55 inch TV and good speaker system been playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. And have been thinking that although it's kind of nice. I'd rather spend evenings with J. To just sit in recliners on the back deck reading books beside each other with the cats and the windchime and spring would bring me far more happiness than playing a video game in the evening. And instead of trying to stay up a bit on my days off, (because I work night shift), instead of staying up to 3 or 4 AM playing this video game, I'm so much happier to go to bed, read a book a short time, spoon a bit and fall asleep with J.

To sneer at loving, really loving, spring is....... I can see it as sick, absurd, nonsensical. I can see it as all that despite having been stuck in such a frame of mind for I think a long time. I think anyway. My memory isn't close to good enough to really say. But pretty damm sure I never 'loved' spring like this.

It's other things really. Takes a lot of other things to feel such a feeling as this. And 'love' could be split into so, so, so many other things. And with that splitting people, like me, might not go decades not realizing what they're missing.

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Apples are a wonderful food. It's like magic. Money doesn't grow on trees. But food does. Apples are wood like yet sweet, edible. And one feels quite good in a subtle way. It's so gradual and so hard to put one's finger on. But it's perhaps crucial. And I have seen more than one fruitarian who acted like he was on crack, (in a extreme happy sort of way). I missed out on the wonders of fruit to a large degree for many years because I thought protein was so important. And I think that last sentence and feel stupid, but last night I mentioned to one of the endless weight watcher woman at work to try just eating apples for three days. And she immediately brought up the lack of protein. Yet the fruitarians I've known had the highest strength to body weight ratios of the people I've personally known.

Cinnamon has a subtle soothing effect.

Attached some nice speakers to my 55 inch tv and was listening to the music stations they have up in the 900's. And I find I prefer listening to blues as opposed to electronic. But, this is just because the recording has so much more life. In theory I prefer electronica (at least generally speaking). But I'm sick of the 'sterile' feel.

Reverb for example. Reverb perhaps essentially. It exists to tell you what the room is where the sound is emanating from. One hears reverb and should be able to tell to a large degree what the room was like. It's crucially important. I love huge reverb. But, increasingly I'm realizing/thinking that it must be authentic. It can be a VSTs preset. Using 'cathedral' setting isn't the optimum. Optimum perhaps, or better anyway, would be taking a dry recording and playing it in a cathedral very loud while rerecording it from far away. And short of that, the best reverb for voice is simply standing very far away from the microphone.

So music recorded on a computer. The biggest issue is reverb. That it's all messed up compared to real instruments. That one listens and can tell the sound they're hearing isn't authentically bouncing off real walls and chairs, etc. And so the life is missing. And it's inferior.

...but it's inferior in the way that seeing the zipper on the Dr. Who monster costume is inferior. Which, actually, it's all about imagination anyway. You should already be using your imagination. You should already know the monster isn't real. That you see a zipper shouldn't matter. It's slightly absurd if the zipper matters. And actually being bothered by imperfect reverb is somewhat similarly absurd.... Although only in the sense that each instrument symbolizes something beyond the actual instrument. The bass is a living thinking entity, etc. If the bass is just a bass, truly just a bass in your mind, then I guess imperfect reverb is more of a legitimate gripe.

If on the other hand the bass symbolizes something else, then imperfect reverb is a zipper on the monster costume.