The Sublime Roundabout

This was a VERY interesting read: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/12/21/506347676/when-swinton-and-cho-talk-race-the-points-lost-in-translation One of the things that we don't do well as a society, even in our post-modern world, is engage each other on meaningful and substantive levels regarding questions of race. It also extends to gender, sex and sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, but this article is about race, so that's what I'm referring to. The thing is, people of color (a blanket term I'm using here to mean non-white, and which in my mind would include Hispanics) are not necessarily interested in the particular issues. This is what the author is referring to at the end of the piece. That conversation is narrow in scope and effect, and leaves people of color feeling frustrated because folks just don't "get it." And just what is it that we're supposed to get? Well, that's a tough one. I've said before that the world ...

It's only in life that we feel pain Death is not painful Life is

Sartre talks of an afternoon spent in the park, trying (in vain, it would seem) to exist. This effort to exist is the essence of existential philosophy. So often we try to exist, but we keep getting interrupted - sometimes by internal struggles, and sometimes by external stimuli. Here's what he says about it: I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp posts of the bandstand and the Velleda, in the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects . . . how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Mas-queret Fountain sounded in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with signs; my nostrils overflowed with a...

The scars on my broken heart Are life furrows in a farmer's field Freshly turned Dark and deep and fertile Waiting for the seeds and rains and sun That will inevitably come And so though my heart is rent Hope shines brightly For a new birth of life From what once seemed dead and fallow

This is Neuschwanstein. Check it: OK, that last one is Sagrada Familia... Still cool. But Gaudi...