To return to the present is to be in contact with life. Life can be found only in the present moment, because 'the past no longer is' and 'the future has not yet come'.
The mind has fixed the partitions. Constancy is the nature of the mind and fluency is the nature of life. That's why the mind is obsessed; it is always fixed, solid. And life is not rigid; it is fluid, it is flexible, it keeps moving in reverse. Something is alive one moment, dead the next. One person was young at this moment, old at the next. The eyes were beautiful, they are no longer there - now they are just ruins. How the face was like a rose, now there is nothing there—not even a shadow of the past. The beautiful becomes ugly, life becomes death, and death continues to be born again....
Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet.
VI. The Sunset of Mankind
zaman yonetimi
Information these days is no longer a scarce resource - attention, on the other hand, is in short supply. So why are we so irresponsible with it? I doubt you're so profligate with your health, your reputation or your money. Two thousand years ago, Seneca wondered the same thing: when it comes to money, the great philosopher pondered, we're tight-fisted. Yet when it comes to our time, we're as spend- thrift as can be - even though time is the only commodity with which we really ought to be miserly.
Over the course of my life I've read countless books on time management and tried out dozens of their well- meaning suggestions. Yet I have come to the conclusion that, for all the strategies and techniques they suggest, there is no easier and more productive method of reclaiming time than giving up the news.
Sayfa 49Kitabı okudu
“People often tell me I am a pessimist; that I do not believe in the strength of the Russian people; that I am obsessive in my opposition to Putin and see nothing beyond that,” she wrote. “I see everything, and that is the whole problem. I see both what is good and what is bad… By 2016 many of my generation may no longer be around, but our children will be alive, as will our grandchildren. Do we really not care what kind of life they will have, or even whether they will have a life at all?”
Sayfa 12Kitabı okudu
For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of everybody – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. It is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use.
