"...but my words shall not pass away"?

who in human history has had views of the world that have stood the "tests of time"?

Moses? Plato? Pythagoras? Ptolemy? Augustine? Dante? Thomas? Bacon? Galileo? Newton? Goethe? Emerson? Einstein? et al...

even the words in the Bible "heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away", (Matthew 24:35) seem -- sub specie mundi -- clearly already during some centuries to have increasingly passed out of the belief of many. (even if we still have the year "2012".)

"Steppenwolf" as a personality type

probably few take the idea "Steppenwolf" as a real type of person seriously (though it was one of Hesse's most autobiographical novels). just as, one must have a certain inner experience and perspective of life, one's life and the world, to be able to enjoy reading Goethe's Faust.

breaking news: human insignificance increases

while the moon may noticeably influence a peoples' sleep or societies' criminal activities, and can also for a time make a river seem romantic... Hubble again has more deeply revealed just how vastly insignificant we apparently are.
"awesome" in the words of a scientist about the "universe" we are being shown is perhaps about as adequate and realistic as it sounds with immature teens.
Pascal is well-known for having written of his fright of infinite space. Nietzsche later wrote of how our earth is adrift from what had been believed to be its moorings of meaning. Scientists are now rightly proud of what they have been able to discover via the Hubble telescopes. and yet, while for most people even the politics in the societies in which they live are distant to their lives, the solar system, not to seriously consider our own reported galaxy, are hardly a part of their lives. and yet it seems the extremely distant, "irrelevant", recent "news" which the Hubble telescope has brought of the oldest times is bad, disheartening, even disminding. an increase of human desolation and insignificance.

close to the edge

the people i know do not seem to know how close to my inner edge I am being so little really known. they perhaps read "stephenwolf" as show and pretense rather than desperation and a plea.

Russian uncertainties for certain

living in Moscow Russia one needs be able to emotionally go through unexpected surprises, changes, shocks...a company or a shop closes, someone in a stable job suddenly loses it, an entire building is 'there one week and gone the next', a reliable service is cancelled... these can make one shake inside, but that is life in Russia.

historical (in)sighteeing

perhaps it is somewhat like being an explorer and scientist of history...today received new reports, mailed gifts at a planned party: The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (1969) by Victor Kiernan; Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre (1991) by Martin Green; Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myth of Orient (1994) by Rana Kabbani; The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997) by M. W. Lewis and K. E. Wigen; The Japanese Discovery of Europe (1952) by Donald Keene; and Inventing Africa (2011) by Robin Derricourt.

hopefully the next few weeks will be as engaging, enlightening and satisfying as these titles suggest. the goal being insights into our human story...like historical (in)sightseeing.

will only understanding will be changed? or -- rhetorically, but really to escape the daily mundane --  better go to a series of Bach concerts, a Viennese ball, or a "magic theater"? or again to Optima Pustyn or Dornach?

Magellan, monsters and Cameron in the Pacific

finished the well-written "Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe -- Over the Edge of the World" (2003) by Laurence Bergreen. 5 ships with 260 crew left Seville August 10, 1519; on September 8, 1522, 1 ship of 18 bare survivors returned to Seville (Magellan not among them).

what is interesting -- in a year when a private explorer, James Cameron, in his own submarine can view the deepest known place in the earth's seafloor, in the Mariana Trench (not so far from where Magellan was killed unnecessarily attacking natives) -- was the transition in viewing the world.

"At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures....To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in The Thousand and One Nights....Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far higher. These days there are no undiscovered places on earth; in the age of the Global Positioning System, no one need get lost. But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of the world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to destroy them." (p. 73)

Cameron saw some odd sea life, but hardly monsters. someone perhaps has written an appropriate 'eulogy to monsters'...the predecessors of eg recent years' physical challenges and "extreme sports". however that may be, Bergreen has written a good word on the circumnavigation undertaken with Magellan as Captain General.

the best and worst of the human

if one, merely for good example, realistically compares Salman Rushdie and the common world-wide protester of the latest offending film -- just the recent wave of such events -- one is able to evaluate and understand the top and the bottom of the human being. anthropology on the TV screen.

R. I. P.?

perhaps best not to till the examination is over -- even if the Examiner seems already dead and gone.

cliché everyone?

there is a deep difference -- rarely noticed I notice -- between those who speak, even quite "intelligently" and/or prominently, using set expressions, cliches, idioms, fixed metaphors, etc, consciously, and those who do not realize that they are so expressing themselves.

self- vs crowd-control

the current attacks on embassies and consulates mainly in the "Middle East" due the "inflamed passions" at a insult to their religious leader shows again, by the hourly news, how those without self-control require crowd-control.
an interesting piece on origin of the expression "the thin veneer of civilization" can be found at: http://www.erblist.com/erbmania/nkima/veneer.html

dispirited?

a person can feel dispirited.
Nature too.

and I pray to the missing God that the universe is not also so.

in a deep theological coma?

one of the signs of a very deep human self-ignorance is in those who so often and loudly speak of and, so they claim, for "God", unaware that if He Is, He surely Is able to watch their every thought, word and deed.
they speak about Him and His being, as if He wasn't actually.

God the Institutionalized Grandfather

God the Institutionalized Great Grandfather, mysteriously appears in public only in rare moments of lucidity, while there are hordes who claim to preach on His behalf.

by grasping ideas in the sky

(without a norm-al family, home, work/CV, interests, occupations, life...)
I find that I must try to hold my self up by grasping ideas in the sky. often in these years I find I am not strong enough.

ignore the lights?

reading in The Adventurer -- The Fate of Adventure in the Western World (1974) by Paul Zweig.
in a coffee shop in Moscow in the pretentiously-named European Shopping Center, the book  -- as an example only -- suggested:
how is it that such enlightening insights, such clarifying words, have so few eager eyes and ears? the pervasive darkness and dumbness?!

Harry Hallers of the world, unite!?

perhaps those who recognize themselves as learned kin of Hesse's "Harry Haller", sh/could write to "unite"? at least to commiserate!

from a Colorado to a China peak

leaving the South as a "sweet Southern boy" to hitch out west searching for...
I could barely then imagine what I was doing, though I felt I had to...
'testing of self' for sure...but that was about all my Southern upbringing allowed me to conceive.
I somehow at the time came to believe that sitting on a mountain allowed one's mind to calm (whatever I thought that would mean or bring), so I headed for the Rockies...
now, four decades later, reading history and lit on lit of pilgrimage, travel, adventure, quest...I can understand such historically, philosophically, religious/spiritually, though less certainly in regards to literature per se.
the trip in July on to Mt Tai was a kind of culminatory continuation of that vague need years ago -- which took me then, alone, to the peak of a Colorado mountain -- but now to the top of that Taoist mountain with conscious intent. (Still alone.)

an earthly seeking of a paradise

it would, it seems to me, be an overly-clever exaggeration to say that post-Soviet Russian consumerism, such as it has shown itself to be, is either a misconceived earthly seeking of paradise ("svetli budushem"), long pent-up desires, or just a copying of the life-styles in the "West". they are not conscious enough for that.

outer and/or inner journey?

which was the more life-changing and lasting journey this summer -- the outer or the inner?
my trip to China for 3 difficult weeks...with that glimpse of Mao in his anti-Feng-shui Memorial? the crowds of the forbidden in the Forbidden City? thoughts on the politics of the aesthetics of decor in the Great Hall of the People? my visit to Confucius' home? that day's ordeal to reach the top of desecrated sacred Mt Tai? ...
my soon -- in our jet-age -- enduring again, with an attempted smile, the thoughtless mental state in the Heart of Dixie? the nervous excitement on "hiking out" on one pontoon for those high wind moments on my Hobie Wave? the emergency beaching of the boat, in fear, as lightning struck too near? the great fried crab claws?...
or the insights and comprehensions of our human story via reading through When China Rules the World, The Idea of the West, The Adventurer -- The Fate of Adventure in the Western World, Inventing Europe, et al?

foggy minds in the USA

an observation I have made of many in the USA is that, with rather little serious common educational and study background, and yet a general idealism at least of American and/or "universal" ideals and values, is that people live in a kind of personal idea fog. they don't have a shared intellectual conception of history, their society, themselves, the secular and the spiritual, etc, so they of necessity talk in and from their own personal fog of ideas. were they clear about their ideas, and how these relate to the world, others, history, etc, they would not be foggy.

fearful pulses in the eyes

even in the deeper pulses in the eyes of the Ambassador's wife yestereve, as I tried my best to seem casual and friendly as we exchanged some "small talk", I could see why I am so out of place in the USA, and feel like a solitary "steppenwolf".

escape via an era of consumption

is the culture of consumption, with its activity of shopping, not an understandable effort to escape for a time deeper and darker realities of human history?

by spirit alone

only a kind of ethereal, insightful reading keeps me at times from sliding back down into a Steppenwolfian solitary pit. but such an escape is not oft in regular reading.

...by books alone?

man does not live by books alone...unless he must eat his bread so too.

and after hope dies...?

I once asked a Russian friend here -- who died of cancer due to the intense stress of a political-economic attack by the new powers here (he himself was a friend of Gorbachof) -- what happens after "Hope dies". he said: try Vera or Lyubov (Faith and Love).
and as I have, after China, perhaps 1 remaining item now on my "bucket list", a geographic net of  Samos, Ephesus, Patmos...I wonder what happens when the "bucket list" is done?

query II to Cathy

if "companion" (com- + pān bread + -iōn) is someone with whom one shares bread...how might one construct a word for someone with whom one shares... soul? ideas? travels? et al!