Misgivings

"I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings."

Misleading Notes to Myself

One life is fragile. Life itself is not. Life continues deep within the earth and inbetween the stars.

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Thomas Pynchon: a seriously talented writer determined not to take his talent too seriously for too long.

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Pynchon's Inherent Vice: Shaggy grows up, ditches Scooby-Doo and the gang, goes public with his drug use, changes his name to Sportello, and becomes a private detective in L.A.

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Every respiration is a part of the same process that moves the planets and illuminates the stars. Being is creation.

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God is one of the ways we attempt to understand what is beyond our understanding.

Evil

"There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long-term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there's no reason not to."

Intolerance and Bigotry

"There may have been a time when it was commonly in the interests of political leaders to stoke their people's intolerance and bigotry to the point of international strife. This time is passing."

Idolatry

"In some respects, Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Had it been implemented, the reformers' program would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult; a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen; and a centralized state with a single, national shrine. The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology. You could not manipulate God by sacrifice, and God certainly did not live in his temple, which instead of being a scared "center, as of old, was merely a house of prayer.

But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists' reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the only symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image. In the past, Marduk's power had always been challenged by Tiamat's, Baal's by Mot's. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests. When something inherently finite -- an image, an ideology, or a polity -- is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute. The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous."

Everything About Literature

“Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. . . .It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterward in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.”