Flashes

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 ...

Because of the volatility of the world, I decided to leave The Book of Disquiet for the moment to hopefully return to it later. For now, I define it as an emotional bible that you can open at random and what you'll read may well resonate with what is happening inside you. Instead, I watched  The Life of Chuck . It is the most existentialist movie I have seen. Thank you, Stephen King and Mike Flanagan . You beautifully verbalized and visualized something that everyone wonders and will experience.

Before starting with Pessoa , I read Martin Page 's How I Became Stupid , being delighted by its beginning and getting more and more disappointed during its progress. (Despite his English sounding name, Page is French.) The book is about a young intellectual man doing a boring office job and suffering from existential angst . He tries to find a way out of the latter by studying options like alcoholism and suicide with the help of "experts." To not spoil the book too much, I only reveal that he decides to drop these options and after certain turns finds himself working in investing , the lucrative side effects of which seem to bury his sensitivity.  Pessoa's book starts in a similar way. There is a man working in an office and suffering from deep existential angst. But he has no way out of it nor does he even look for it. Instead, he verbalizes his emotions in depths like no other. It lacks all the entertaining elements that Page's book has and just takes you deepe...