Sunday, April 25, 2010

Answer 107 & 108 - Weight. And Light. The Glass is Half.

We argue about perspective some nights.  Sometimes I can't see him for the clouds and he needs a shovel to find me.


This from Milan Kundera's, The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht). If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it all in their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground.But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements are free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being.half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?..





3 comments:

  1. Perhaps there are clues in the Earth itself? Even the positive and negative of our planet shifts from time to time. Could what determines the positives and negatives of us mortals be controlled by our very own humanist geodynamo which shifts our moral compasses? If so, couldn't weight and lightness both be positive - depending on which direction the needle of our compass points. ;-)

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  2. I don't know — after going back and reading my post...it appears more like I might be "on something"! :-)

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