excerpt.

"The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of gods and us. I do not deny that art, like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadows of more serious arts, the kind of art that, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality. The art which tends toward destruction, the art of cynics and nihilists, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial - a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose: a comic game because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.

Like legitimate art, legitimate criticism is a tragic-comic holding action against entropy. Art builds contemporary walls against life's leveling force, against the ruin of what is splendidly unnatural in us: consciousness. Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness. Criticism restates and clarifies, reinforces the wall. "

John Gardner

DECEMBER ~ NORAH JONES live at Ancienne Belgium 2010

small.

These days aren’t exactly bright. Ain’t dull either. I content myself with a weird friendship at school. He ain’t exactly kind. Ain’t haughty either. He would tell jokes that never made me laugh, but now and then leave a halfhearted smirk on the hardly-curved corners of my lips. I don’t doubt my future as much as I doubt my presence anymore. Everyone has their average time range to shrug off jet-lag. In this estranged environment, seems mine is a year. People get used to everything. They are a race somehow destined to survive. Striding on helplessly, knowing not where to flow to, blindly carrying on no matter what, ain’t that a sad truth about human?

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Feeling isolated from the world on Tuesday is a crime that I just cant help committing. The light azure shade of the sky is transparent that I come to think if I stare really hard I could see its furthest point on this biosphere. There's even this sudden inclination to pinpoint the causes of the ever elusive sadness.

Old connections float in front of my eyes like lanterns too light to be held down among these shivering fingers.

where art thou, i wonder,
how have you been?
have you yet to feel tired of existing on earth, like i do?

We parted hands and eyes, split lives and go separate ways. As it so happened I felt as though the passage to our human connection, a part of mine, shut down, died out, forever.

But somehow I still like to believe that part alive somewhere, with you maybe. Pray it solace, the sort of sense your presence brings, to assuage the old pains carved on the remnants of us.

things that I like there at Crash Course.

Secularism Rationality Individualism Movie Friday Logic Literature

note to self.

Our strength and intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm out heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. – William James.