We don’t need an eclipse; we’ve already got a surplus of darkness. From Edward Curtin at lewrockwellcom:
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air”
– Lord Byron, “Darkness”
Overheard in a coffee shop: A woman and a man are sitting together at a table. She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book. Looking at the screen, she says to him, “I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial to full, and the full eclipse lasts just 3-4 minutes.”
The man replies: “And if you’re lucky, the partial eclipse lasts more than 70 to 80 years, because then the full eclipse is forever.”
She acts as if she doesn’t hear him, as if his sardonic humor has nothing to do with her death anxiety or with the media’s celebration of the darkness visible of the total solar eclipse due to occur on April 8th across North America that the media is calling “eclipse mania,” while failing to mention they are promoting it as such.
It is strange how today people revel in the darkness even while fearing it. Sunsets are far more popular than sunrises, even while death is the great bogeyman and birth deserves cigars and champagne. Crowds regularly gather in the evenings, cell phone cameras raised, to laud the death of the light that they embalm on their dinguses (i.e.gadgets, just as the atomic bomb was nicknamed “The Gadget”), trying to freeze time, even as they celebrate the death of another day. This twisted relationship to day and night, life and death, darkness and light is perhaps best summoned up in a few lines of poetry from Rainer Maria Rilke from his Duino Elegies:
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.
We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.
This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our god and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
Bill Hicks
Yess! Russian version of UTube has Dr. Strangelove or the hilarity of nuclear annihilation and no advertisements but there are some skin flicks that show up in the recommended rotation, this craps all over Tube.
Some of these old movies clock in at 1.5hrs or less and are chock full of entertainment and philosophy.
Be like Alfred E. Newman and relax these things happen in mob rule by the spiteful burn it all down mutants and they’ll get their wish.
A man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
Alexis de Tocqueville
To be here now in these circumstances is balance on the edge of nothingness. Da-sein being here in these in circumstances is determined in every aspect of death. What is the purpose of life without death. It becomes a endless repetition without meaning. Meaning exists in the narrow restrains of death.
That’s why the fascination with darkness!
And the existence of horror of death is the means for something to be rather than nothing. It is though hard to remember when you are the one experiencing the terror of death.