THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2005
09:49
I am thinking of concluding this year’s notes with the following words: I have found my place in the sun – under a tree, in the shade, together.
17:42
For a moment I thought it was 21 November. Then I remembered it’s only 13 October! I got 38 days! For free! To enjoy as I like! To do as I please!
17:58
Another one: age and the uncomfortable sensations that go with it.
Calculate the role and the effect of assumptions and competition with other people your age and from your cultural background.
What would be the result if you start ignoring both – if you ignore what you reckon you’re supposed to do at age X or should already have done, and you simply lose interest in how much better or worse you are doing compared to your peers, and you truly live at your own pace and according to your own beliefs?
19:35
We always say: “If the world as we know it continues …”
But how does it work when you read in the newspapers every week of a 1918 Spanish flu type of pandemic that would “inevitably” hit within the next eighteen months or so? What does one say when they mention the possibility of up to fifty million victims? Until when do you simply take note, and when does it start affecting your thoughts about your own future?
[This note refers to bird flu, specifically the H5N1 variant. Wikipedia: “On September 29, 2005, David Nabarro, the newly appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warned the world that an outbreak of avian influenza could kill 5 to 150 million people.”]
FRIDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2005
12:11
Here’s an idea: It is the moral obligation of enlightened people to use their reproductive abilities to produce the next generation so that they can become the enlightened leaders of the communities where they will live and work in the future.
Let me try again: It is my moral duty to use my reproductive abilities to make a contribution to …
19:03
“Change (or improve) the environment, and you change (or improve) the person,” sounds like so many verbs, and so many other parts of speech. Still, the idea contained in this combination of sounds was the cornerstone of Marxism.
SATURDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2005
09:26
The possibility of life after death always comes down to arguments and reasoning on the one hand, and stories on the other. Nobody can say, “Let me go and show you!”
* * *
So close to someone that you can feel her breathing on your chest, and her heart beating against yours.
* * *
We – the members of the community – agree, for the sake of civilian control, that everyone should take responsibility for his or her own actions – except if you are too young or clinically disturbed. However, free will is not quite as free as we would like it to be.
13:55
I have called “Personal Agenda” many things, but in a continued effort to crystallise the identity, as it were, of the project, I say again: the material is personal testimony to the attempts of one person – not a popular writer, famous entertainer or well-known athlete – to try to make sense of life, mostly outside the religiously approved explanations that were originally given to him.
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