Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 21 NOVEMBER 2005

A handyman goes to a neighbouring town late one afternoon to fix a washing machine. For 45 minutes he is focused on the machine in front of him, all the wires and plugs and tubes, and all the tools he needs. Perhaps he lies flat on his back on the kitchen floor with his concentration sharply focused on what he is doing. This is as it should be; this is how he will get the job done properly.

This handyman must however be able to pull back at any moment from the washing machine in front of him, and answer questions on issues more important than this specific washing machine. For example, he must have a vague idea in whose house he is – maybe the local dentist; he should know in what town he is – not his own town, but the neighbouring town; he must know what time he wants to be at home – perhaps around 18:00; he must also know how to drive to get home; perhaps even what the weather looks like outside – maybe he has heard the thunder of an approaching storm. If the situation requires it, he may also consider other things: his age – mid-forties; his family – wife and two children; income – ±R12,000 per month; and his financial obligations – home and car payments, groceries, school fees, insurance policies, etcetera.

Should it be necessary, this handyman would be able to sit back, away from the machine and the tools and tubes and bolts and pipes, and for a few moments consider these things.

WEDNESDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2005

On the subject of paths laid out for you, and the steps you take in your youth and your twenties to make this path your own, the following metaphor: a tapestry. The motif was already worked out long before you begin weeks of patient labour with wool and needle. At the end you have a beautiful tapestry. The tapestry is your own. You worked hard on it. But that does not change the fact that the basic image, the pattern, was laid out long ago, by someone else.

THURSDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2005

How do you continue with your life if you have suffered a great personal loss? I reckon you don’t … you can’t continue with your life as you knew it. That life, that consciousness of things is over. What you do is you start a new life, built on the foundation and with the building materials of your old life. I believe only then can you truly continue with your life.

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WEDNESDAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2005

11:16

Religion is closely linked to identity, and national pride is closely linked to identity. The protection of the source of identity is literally a matter of life and death. Wars are fought over religion, national pride and the protection of hearth and home. It can thus be said that war is intimately linked to identity.

11:20

Wars have been waged in the past for resources, land, prestige, adventure and the possibility of looting.

[15/11/10: War is waged by military and political leaders at the top, and by foot soldiers on the ground, and probably for different reasons.]

FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER 2005

Why is it important whether you are a middle-class intellectual or a working-class intellectual? Because it affects where you live, what you drive, where you and your family buy clothes, what kind of groceries you can afford, even where your children go to school (if you have children). It affects how you see yourself in the community where you live. If you position yourself in a middle-class environment but you cannot foot the proverbial bill, you will think of yourself as a failure, and you will most likely be viewed as one.

WEDNESDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 2005

No rational person can deny that we live in a grey world. But whether we see the world in shades of grey or black and white, decisions are never grey. This is the dilemma: making black-and-white decisions in a grey world.

SUNDAY, 20 NOVEMBER 2005

Have I become one of them? Them – who become restless when they are confined to their own company, who grow so fond of the companionship of a specific person that they come to need it, like oxygen.

* * *

To serve the cause of civilisation is a worthy and noble endeavour.

* * *

Our flesh and our consciousness last at most decades. Our bones, including the skull that houses our consciousness while life flows through our veins, might still exist a thousand years from now.

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WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2005

“Real life is how well we pretend.” ~ character from Ready When You Are Mr McGill

15:39

I find the metaphor of life as a train journey with stations where you get off very useful. So it is that I ask at this moment: What if I say I have found my station? I know it is not New York Central, but it’s not the middle of nowhere, either!

It would still be possible to travel to another station later on, wouldn’t it? One can, if you so wish, continue the journey at a later stage, right? It is after all not the Middle Ages, or the 1950s!

Another thing: What happens if you hoped to reach a station more important than the one where you currently find yourself, but you realise your ambition has exceeded your capabilities? Do you jump on the roof of the first train that passes through, with other refugees without a ticket, just so you can still be on your way? Or if you must stay somewhere, must it necessarily be in a cheap motel in a cold room with leaking taps and stained bedding and a broken old TV?

22:40

For me, idealism has always been an inspiration, but the truth is that idealism, in practice, can be a bloody affair.

The French Revolution was launched by idealists (“liberty, equality, fraternity”), and entrenched by terror. National Socialism in Germany was fuelled by a corrupt ideal, but an ideal nonetheless – one of racial purity, and implemented by methods that included the death camps. Communism was the ideal of a classless world. Again, the practical implementation of the idea (at least in the twentieth century) was accompanied by terror, mass slaughter and almost pathological suppression of personal freedom. Fundamentalist Islam’s penchant for wasting innocent blood is well-known, with the ideal outcome of a paradise on earth.

Is idealism rotten at its core? Does idealism carry, within its veins, the seed of terror and human suffering?

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MONDAY, 17 OCTOBER 2005

15:42

The issue of where you choose to live reminds me of something Ayn Rand wrote (my wording): because you are a free entity and your choices expressions of free will, you need to justify your choices (to yourself).

If I choose, for example, to stay in Taiwan rather than to go back to South Africa, I constantly have to justify it to myself in order for me to continue to believe that this is indeed the right choice. Sometimes this is a problem.

I am also wondering: Why do we need to justify it?

16:18

Is it not true that it would sometimes be easier if we had fewer choices – if we were less free, as it were? It would be easier to justify our choices, because we would only shrug our shoulders and say, “What do you mean? This was the best choice under the circumstances.” Or better yet: “I had no other option!”

However, if you are a free individual and your choices expressions of your free will, you have to be able to justify to yourself that they are indeed, under the circumstances, the right choices.

My question remains: Why?

20:40

A few thoughts from last week that got lost on the way to the notebook:

I. […]

II. […]

III. Saturday night at [a wedding banquet] at the Grand Hotel, I was standing outside smoking a cigarette. I was thinking about myself, in my fancy pants and my fancy shirt and my fancy tie and my polished shoes, amongst all the other fancy people.

I thought: There is a Hierarchy of Environments. On the one hand you have an environment where you are absolutely the boss, where you can say what you want, do what you want, look the way you want – your own backyard, in other words. On the other end of the spectrum you have an environment where it is dictated to you how you should look, what you should do, how you should do it and what you should say; an environment where you are for all practical purposes not exactly free. In between there are dozens of other environments.

The environment where I found myself on Saturday night was one where I was in Basic Polite Mode.

TUESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2005

Earlier I wondered why we need to justify our choices to ourselves. I think I now have the answer.

If you are in a position to make choices every day, you need to believe in your ability to make choices. If you do not believe in it, it is similar to a situation where you have to cycle to work every day, but every time you get on the bike you are unsure of your ability to move the bike forward and keep your balance. Or when you have to do a specific job every day but every day you fear that you are going to mess up and that you will need to suffer the consequences.

So it is with free will and choice. You have to nurture confidence in your ability to make the right choice, or the best choice under the circumstances. That is why you have to justify your choices to yourself – you need to prove to yourself that you are able to function as a free individual. By believing that you have the ability to make good choices most of the time (or the best under the circumstances), you gain the confidence to do it again the next day – to again, when faced with important decisions, make the best choice under the circumstances.

———–

[In a note on Monday, 17 October at 09:26 I mentioned that I believe that “free will is not quite as free as we would like it to be”. Nevertheless, we are usually aware of the extent to which we do have the ability to choose between two or more options. If we have to admit that we have, or that we did have, that ability, we need to justify our choices to ourselves.]

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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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