Stringing Random Quotes into One Chain of Thought.
My random thoughts and quotes are not completely random. They are random but taken from the quotes included on my tear-away calendar. I tossed them in a stack and when I started to flip through them, I saw a pattern or a story.
“Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn’t the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.” - Mike Royko
I don’t know who Mike Royko is, but I think he has it right. If on is facing the world with open eyes, then one would have trouble being that happy when faced with the crappy place the world happens to be. Or maybe they just aren’t smart enough to see what is before them. Ernest Hemingway seems to think so… “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
There is an odd truth in this. The more I know the more disillusioned I am. The more I know the more I tend to hate humanity as a whole. The more I know the less hope I have for this planet. The more I know the less hope I have for my own future.
The more I know the more I think the planet needs to start over. People are inherently selfish, which is the true root of all evil.
Dostoevsky must have felt a certain amount of this because he said, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.”
There is a reason I don’t read the Russians. Too depressing.
The Russians seem to really relate to depressing things. A Russian Proverb is “If you wake up and you’re not in pain, you know you’re dead.” You can say the same thing in three words. Life is Pain.
This concept seems to fly right over the head of Paris Hilton who seems to think that “Everything bad that can happen to a person has happened to me.” I don’t think she truly understands the depth of bad things that can happen to people.
February 13, 2013 at 10:46 am
Right, the pain lets you know you’re still alive. But you didn’t always feel it, did you? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to be completely healthy and live without pain or discomfort? No, I don’t mean some kind of magic, I mean – what is life like for people that aren’t suffering? What does it feel like? Sometimes, I like imagining it. It seems to help. As they used to say in the Corps, it’s mind over matter – you don’t mind, it don’t matter. Easier said than done, of course, but imagining it is the first step.
February 13, 2013 at 11:31 am
That’s not the type of pain I was thinking of when I was putting that together. I was thinking of the emotional and mental pain of an uncaring world in which horrible people do horrible things to other people and that at their most basic nature, humans are really just that ape who picked up a bone or a rock to kill his fellow apes over something he wanted beneath the shadow of that black obolisk.
February 13, 2013 at 11:34 am
Oh. Disregard my comment then.