we are all asleep

if "God" is, then it seems to me probable that we are all more or less in a kind of coma, whether we are asleep or awake.

the death of God?

Nietzsche's madman declared the death of God; less lamented was that of the devil...and what of the spiritual hierarchy... and monsters? seems there was a massacre really.

but at the very same time, many never believed any of these deaths, and eg angels were, and still are, very popular.

what is serious history of ideas to one, is rejected by the other.
an inclusive history of mankind would need be able to comprehend both.

consumerussia

Holy Russia...Czarist Russia...Soviet Russia...Consumer Russia

play without a script(ure)?

even "All the World's a Stage" could be comforting, until it was recognized that the Director was missing, the Assistants apparently had left the Theater, the Script seemed outdated, the Plot incredible,...leaving many actors feeling lost, alone and absurd.

holey Moscow

as VVP drove on the empty streets to the Kremlin for his inauguration, just near the iconic St. Basil's Cathedral, his motorcade drove about 100 meters from the edge of a large hole in the ground, where the Hotel Rossiya once stood.

eyesore it may have been, with some 3000+ rooms it could hold many tourists in Moscow. (its loss kept subsequent hotel room prices exorbitant, for some conveniently so.) with the weeds, perhaps it is more attractive now as a huge hole?

in March 2006, demolition began on the Hotel Rossiya, with plans to build a new hotel complex (the project to be overseen by architect Sir Norman Foster); in October of 2006 Supreme Arbitration Court annulled the tender.

now, for more than 6 years (and certainly with a legal circus and nightmare surrounding the place, and when will this end? how?), just near the center of Moscow, on the east side of the Kremlin, just beside the symbol of Russia: St. Basil's Cathedral, Russians can see their good Russian earth, in the hole where tourists used to stay.

VVP is proud of Russia, but it is best to not look too closely out the windows of a motorcade, or those of the Kremlin.

RIP -- rest in posterity?

with someone like Nietzsche, who was by some considered mad before he went mad...is posthumous recognition interest in his work a kind of mass for the dead? a kind of resting in posterity? (requiescat in posteritate, or requiescat in fama)

comparative inaugurals

during the late Soviet times, the majority of the people a visitor would meet had a common enemy: the government and its bureaucracy. this gave them solidarity.
today, it seems that many of those who even voted for VVP think he is the best they can expect. but it seems very few people are in fact for the Re-Re-Elected President.
VVP was driven in a well-planned and -timed and -televised motorcade to the Kremlin, through empty streets. compare this to Obama's inauguration. (and let us not consider the Queen of England's.)

sic transit gloria cogitati

the rejection by William Godwin of his father's Calvinism leads to his ideas of human perfectibility which are rejected by Malthus whose ideas are accepted by Darwin whose ideas are rejected by Christians.

gravitas in our times?

having watched and considered the TV presentations of the inauguration of Vladimir Putin to the President of Russia (even possibly until 2024), and comparing it the inauguration of US presidents (the last one being President Obama)...it seems to me that gravitas -- if it ever existed, in Rome or later -- is absent from our times. neither Obama nor Putin, nor for examples the Pope or Russian Orthodox Patriarch...have much gravitas of person. and this a true reflections of our societies, cultures and mentalities.

homo sapiens sapiens' instinctive need for meaning

observing the human species not even very intently or clearly reveals a creature with an instinctive need for meaning. this need, this lack, does seem to indicate some immaterial need, an absence.

"...pflanzschule für eine Welt von Geistern..."

it seems that Goethe's words about this material world being a "pflanzschule für eine Welt von Geistern" (a school/nursery for a world of spirits) was influenced, at least in choice of words, by Swedenborg. that seems to me now quite dismaying, as since I have long wanted to find a greater history of this "idea" from both before and after Goethe, finding it may "originate" in Swedenborg is like learning one need look for the source of a river in the clouds.

"God's" and/or Nature's inhumanity to man?

thinking about the Nazi extermination camps, the Soviet "Gulag", and wondering what in human history has been an equivalent good in contrast to these human evils...

"man's inhumanity to man" (from the Robert Burns poem: "Man was made to mourn: A Dirge", 1784) is perhaps more than less understandable (if less than more endurable), but it was the idea which people devolved from Lyell, Darwin, et al, of 'God's and/or nature's inhumanity to man' that people could not, and can not, accept.

and what most humans cannot accept believing in is "'God's' inhumanity to life".

0

it is of course very encouraging to have almost no readers to my blogs. most are marked "0" for visits, not to consider my followers (1 to this date).

Thoreau, Hesse and heroism

a biographer of Emerson and Thoreau describes in his work on Thoreau, how he, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, et al, sought to live 'a heroic life in an unheroic time'. Hesse's biographical "Steppenwolf" sought to live a spiritual life in a world he found mundane and trivial -- seeking a life sub specie aeternitatis amidst one ordered sub specie mundi.
Hesse, who wrote of being awakened by WWI, came to write inoffensive calls for a spiritual and cultural life amidst the world as he found it, which brought on his being being publicly attacked in print by many Germans as a traitor. (WWII he foretold even in the early 20s.)
Hesse would not have called himself a hero; also because such (pretension) is not the task, as he saw it, of a poet. but he did not live in unheroic times.