A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP

"United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed".

Bertrand Russel, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

[Link]

FEAR OR LAZYNESS

MEMORY IS LIKE MOLTEN GOLD

Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy
Batty is expiring, and talks
about how everything
he’s seen will die with him –
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
sea-beams glittering before
the Tannhauser Gates.

Memory is like molten gold
burning its way through the skin
it stops there.
There is no transfer.
Nothing I have seen
will be remembered
beyond me.
That merciful cleaning
of the windows of creation
will be an excellent thing
my interests notwithstanding.

But then again I’ve never been
near Orion, or the Tannhauser
gates,

I’ve only been here.

[“Final Farewell” by Tom Clark]

...AND SAILED CALMLY ON

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

["Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden]

ONE AND CONTINUOUS

"One road there is, signposted in this wise:
Being was never born and never dies.
Four-square, unmoved, no end it will allow.
It never was, nor will be; all is now,
One and continuous. How could it be born
Or whence could it be grown? Unbeing?  - No -
That mayn't be said or thought; we cannot go
So far ev'n to deny it is. What need,
Early or late, could Being from Unbeing seed?
Thus it must altogether be or not."
Parmenides, (~500 BC)

[in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratier, 1951, translated and quoted by Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (2010)]