Flashes

I am not a great fan of book clubs. When reading becomes a duty, it starts resembling homework. Ideally, reading a book should be free of time limits and deadlines. It is a unique encounter between the reader and the writer and should be savoured like a meeting with a good friend. However, I have dreamed of starting a thin book club as there are many great books of ca. 100 pages or at least less than 200. It is time to make this dream into reality in this limited context. I call it a book club only in lack of any other suitable term and would like to think of it as a club for the thin books themselves rather than the readers. Thin books are easy to keep with you and read anywhere - in a cafe, in the park, on the beach, at the dentist's office while waiting for your turn. Also, a threshold for reading (and rereading) a thin book is much lower than that of a thick book. Hence, I have for years kept my eyes open for thought-provoking thin books.  One of them is Stefan Zweig 's Ch...

I finally received Emil Cioran 's book "The Trouble with Being Born" which is a collection of aphorisms. It is hard to swallow as a whole so I am approaching it sporadically and marking with small pencilled circles the aphorisms I think I understand and can relate to so I can later reread them. I find many too pregnant with pessimism and nihilism and there are references to philosophers I only know by name (some of whom, starting from Aristotle, also get theirs). Cioran reminds me of someone who has always been able to see the matrix without choosing the red pill. He might have appreciated the idea of the movie (it came out in 1999 and he died in 1995). "The Fatalism was there from the very beginning, long before I had words for it," he says in an interview. In another one: "The mistake of normal healthy people is to think of death as something that arrives at the end. I discovered very young that death is not outside of life - it is inside it. Immanent. Ev...

Ever since I got my PhD, I have been somewhat ashamed of having a degree that implies that I know something of philosophy when I haven't taken one course in it.  While studying, I was told that the degree called Doctor of Philosophy exists because all subjects were included in philosophy in the Middle Ages. When I check this now, you could back then get a PhD after completing a rigorous study of Theology, Medicine, or Laws. This all had to be preceded by the study of Arts which in those days included either Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic or Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy - hence the degree Master of Arts.  So not much philosophy to write home about in the Middle Ages either, maybe just Logic. When I was 14, I once borrowed a library book on Logic but only remember a simple anecdote that was told first in the book it to illustrate the topic, and I must have soon lost interest in what followed. The anecdote went something like this: There was a cocktail party...

Yesterday, I had one of the cultural experiences my soul has starved for.  There was an Italian film festival at the time when I am not sleeping (anything related to culture normally starts at 9:30 pm in Portugal, following the dinner which starts at 8pm), and I entered a movie theatre at the cultural centre with no expectations as I had not bothered to read the Portuguese description of the movie. It was a semi-autobiographical film by Nanni Moretti called Dear Diary  from 1993. The Italian speech which overlapped the Portuguese subtitles that had some similarities with the Italian vocabulary I had picked up seeing all of the 37 films of Montalbano burned my brain while watching a most relaxing first third of a movie with mesmerizing views and music. After the red silent initial credits, Moretti was riding a vespa through the 90s Rome only stopping to rant to encountered people something related to the cultural past.  It really put to test what I always say to people ...

Three months have passed since I wrote here. First there was a hurricane, a shattering experience, the damage of which has not all yet been repaired. Then the recent, even scarier development in global politics. I can now better than ever before understand why Stefan Zweig found his way out of this world in exile, with the WW2 going on and no end of evil to be seen. All this links to Sapolsky on whose book Determined I am writing an article.  Did we end up here because of what people did before? Certainly. In that case, we have a responsibility for the coming generations - if there will be any - to make this world better and kinder.  The tectonic plates are moving which makes everything unpredictable and unstable but one can only hope that a form of more humane mankind will surface when the moving ends.

I find myself still thinking of The Life of Chuck which had a mind-bending effect on me, similar to what Robert Sapolsky  had.  In his book   Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will , Sapolsky claims that any choice we make is the only one we can make in any situation and depends on our genes , culture, education, our experiences, everything that happened to our ancestors all the way down the line, the current environment, and the situation in question. Sapolsky proves by neurological tests that our brains already make the choices before we make them. The thought of not having free will is frightening to many but for me it was liberating. I became aware of the huge responsibility of my actions and how they affect other people because for the people with whom I interact, I am part of their environment and their experience of life. It made me appreciate these encounters and decide to try to be actively constructive in them.  It may be that The Life of Chuck ...