Flera Om Mina Vänner
Today I finished all my packing and then left the apartment for the city around 3:30, as the sun was setting!!! I was just going to go to the cafe since it was getting too dark for pictures. Most of the people I know here work at the cafes because when I lived here I spent 14 hours a day between them and the Royal Library working on my dissertation. I was happy to find that many of them are still working at the two cafes I have been to.
Mostly though, today was an opportunity to get reacquainted with a few of my oldest and best friends, my books of course. Another of my friends, this one is actually a human being, has called my relationship with my books "unhealthy." According to her I "absolutely have to end up becoming a well-known writer or thinker, otherwise traveling half way across the world to safely steward home a stack of books starts to look like run-of-the-mill obsessive-compulsive behavior." This friend knows crazy when she sees it too, she is Norwegian and Norway suffers from collective national madness. Any place where heavily salted licorice can gain near universal praise has to be suffering from some kind of collective delusion.
"Just try one more piece, its an acquired taste."
"Can I at least wait until the nausea I acquired while you forced me to eat the last five pieces recedes before I get back to acquiring a taste for it!?"
In other news, I was watching a documentary on icebergs this morning while packing when I was hit with a brilliant insight. It must be that Scandinavians developed the ice blue eyes and platinum blonde hair so that they could blend into icebergs and glacial outcroppings a long time ago. These are the only other places that such shades of white and blue are found existing in the world. It must have helped them hide from polar bears or something.
Speaking of great ideas, I have often told people that I think more clearly up here. Cold weather is conducive to productive thought. On the other hand, cold weather is clearly detrimental to life so this fits into the old paradigm of thinking or philosophizing as being at odds with life (think of Socrates willingly drinking the hemlock because after life he would be more fit to philosophize, or Montaigne and the quote that "to study philosophy was to practice dying"). I am by nature a very undisciplined and disorganized thinker, and these attributes are greatly heightened in warm climates. In cold weather I would need to have a tape-recorder constantly at hand to keep up with the pace of clear ideas that come to my mind. Perhaps it is the fact that cold restricts your blood flow and your brain operates on the oxygen carried to it through your circulatory system. In warm weather the blood flows freely and quickly through my veins, and with it the so-called mental product of my mind, gone as quickly as it comes and with as little trace as that left by a light breeze. In cold weather the restricted blood flow keeps the oxygen in my brain just a trace longer and allows me to sustain a thought a little bit longer. So my thoughts are less scattered and they freeze into "concepts" more frequently. Conceptual thinking is the product of "reason," and the production and clarification of concepts is the aim of philosophy. Of course there must be a balance because too much freezing of thought produces worn-out and rigid concepts, which manifest themselves in less lively prose...the proper balance of life and death, though more of the latter. Ahh, this is precisely the kind of terrible scientific theorizing that arises from thinkers trained in the humanities!
Today I finished all my packing and then left the apartment for the city around 3:30, as the sun was setting!!! I was just going to go to the cafe since it was getting too dark for pictures. Most of the people I know here work at the cafes because when I lived here I spent 14 hours a day between them and the Royal Library working on my dissertation. I was happy to find that many of them are still working at the two cafes I have been to.
Mostly though, today was an opportunity to get reacquainted with a few of my oldest and best friends, my books of course. Another of my friends, this one is actually a human being, has called my relationship with my books "unhealthy." According to her I "absolutely have to end up becoming a well-known writer or thinker, otherwise traveling half way across the world to safely steward home a stack of books starts to look like run-of-the-mill obsessive-compulsive behavior." This friend knows crazy when she sees it too, she is Norwegian and Norway suffers from collective national madness. Any place where heavily salted licorice can gain near universal praise has to be suffering from some kind of collective delusion.
"Just try one more piece, its an acquired taste."
"Can I at least wait until the nausea I acquired while you forced me to eat the last five pieces recedes before I get back to acquiring a taste for it!?"
In other news, I was watching a documentary on icebergs this morning while packing when I was hit with a brilliant insight. It must be that Scandinavians developed the ice blue eyes and platinum blonde hair so that they could blend into icebergs and glacial outcroppings a long time ago. These are the only other places that such shades of white and blue are found existing in the world. It must have helped them hide from polar bears or something.
Speaking of great ideas, I have often told people that I think more clearly up here. Cold weather is conducive to productive thought. On the other hand, cold weather is clearly detrimental to life so this fits into the old paradigm of thinking or philosophizing as being at odds with life (think of Socrates willingly drinking the hemlock because after life he would be more fit to philosophize, or Montaigne and the quote that "to study philosophy was to practice dying"). I am by nature a very undisciplined and disorganized thinker, and these attributes are greatly heightened in warm climates. In cold weather I would need to have a tape-recorder constantly at hand to keep up with the pace of clear ideas that come to my mind. Perhaps it is the fact that cold restricts your blood flow and your brain operates on the oxygen carried to it through your circulatory system. In warm weather the blood flows freely and quickly through my veins, and with it the so-called mental product of my mind, gone as quickly as it comes and with as little trace as that left by a light breeze. In cold weather the restricted blood flow keeps the oxygen in my brain just a trace longer and allows me to sustain a thought a little bit longer. So my thoughts are less scattered and they freeze into "concepts" more frequently. Conceptual thinking is the product of "reason," and the production and clarification of concepts is the aim of philosophy. Of course there must be a balance because too much freezing of thought produces worn-out and rigid concepts, which manifest themselves in less lively prose...the proper balance of life and death, though more of the latter. Ahh, this is precisely the kind of terrible scientific theorizing that arises from thinkers trained in the humanities!
posted by Lenin | 11:32 em
1 Comments:
Got to love your little sister! and remember, JFK JR didn't pass the bar the first time (or the second, and maybe not the third??) Your mom would know!!AT
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