[b]Tom Stoppard
Words deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.[/b]
Of course others can nudge it right back again.
When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at ‘meretrix’, a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. ‘Meretrix’! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn’t be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.
On the other hand, one way or another, everything comes down to that. Eventually.
Real data is messy…It’s all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk.
Not only that but who’s to say how real?
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.
Sure, if that actually works for you.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
Okay but less trivial sometimes than others.
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
So, how dumb is that?