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"Every author is creating his own pedigree,"
says Jorge Luis Borges. Like the hero in the illusory Approach to Al-Mu'tasim I
could see myself on a mission trying to find my true identity behind
the veils of our
existence.
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The women house
together in the communal compounds of the clan and their husbands show
up only for the occasional visit. If the man belongs to a different
clan his people will be recompensed for the time of his absence. In
between the visits the “wife” enjoys full sexual liberty and there is
no fear of unwanted pregnancies.
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The Bible speaks of
Saul as a charismatic leader, a man who was a bit of a shaman himself
(I Sam. 19: 24). Saul was the
anointed, the Messiah, the last of the judges and the first of the
princes. But, not surprisingly, the old establishment had a dim view of
the man cutting into their privileges. |
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I
see Jeremiah as a kindred spirit; he's also the best-documented
personality in the entire book. A rare fluke has the otherwise
fragmented sources and the archaeology from Mesopotamia, Judah and
Egypt fall in sync for the same decades of his activity.
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Prophets and
“saviors” come a
dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus,
if we have to, but the combination of circumstance and character in
Sappho’s work gives testimony to a unique sensitivity, almost
obliterated by censorship and persecution of her work.
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"Everywhere, at home and abroad, the
younger generation, with a moving enthusiasm, gave in to the poet of
sentimentality and love, to the smart sound-bite and the tendentious
aphorism, to philosophy and humanitarianism." (Theodor Mommsen).
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A
namesake of mine, in New Mexico, is now convicted for statutory rape.
He is the latest example of a cult leader following an all too familiar
and often repeated paradigm. Such are the people asking us to suffer
our children comming to them.
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So
this is the question: is there such a thing as an underpinning unity in
the larger scheme of things? Are we citizens of a Cosmos, or does the
momentary equilibrium between the forces of chaos create the mere
illusion of sustained structure and order?
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“I rather pull crumbs from the
hairy chest of a passing sailor, screaming and banging the headboard,”
she said. She tilted her head, inspecting the hair. She decided to
color it. “Red,” she said. “It should be red."
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If Christ were of
identical substance with
God the Father, then the Father suffered at the crucifixion just as
badly as his sun. A
dilemma that
would not go away, not even after throwing parthenogenesis into the
brew.
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The
new system of Christian ayatollahs began rolling out the shroud over
culture and education. It took almost a millennium before the dissent
of courageous functionaries would bring about changes from within.
Without the legacy of Symmachus and his compatriots, a kind of cultural
time capsule, the darkness could have lasted even longer.
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Everybody
seemed to walk through a dreamy world of genies and magic, a kind of
Arabian Nights with the new Jerusalem at the center, the treacherous
city on the Bosporus, filling the sky with gold. It was the era of the
Germanic epic, of the formidable Hagen.
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What
has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the
Kamasutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,”
women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.
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On
a rickety table, in front of a second hand bookshop, I found a pocket
sized booklet, A Frenchman’s Itinerary, the Travel Diary of Monsieur Montaigne.
The great man had traveled all the places I know so well from my own
childhood.
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Descartes
wrote in an age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés for everybody who
had the temerity of thinking for himself. This could sometimes make him
giving the appearance of affirming what he didn't really believe.
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My
great-great Grandmother’s letter is a genuine document. She was in her
teens when she lost everything and became a refugee because of the
religious turmoil of her time. I think it was an even greater loss for
the country she left behind.
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Laurence Sterne had
his appointment with destiny rather late. At the age of forty-nine, he
offered his first and only novel to a publisher who of course knew
better than to risk his money on this nonsense. So Sterne paid for the
costs of printing and published himself. Publishers know nothing.
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A
philosopher who never left town in his entire life has revolutionized
our ideas about the human mind. Time and space, he maintained, is all
in the mind, the world of duration and extension out there is something
beyond our mental categories.
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Was
it a twitch of the upper lip or some indecisive fiddling with the
sleeve cuff that became the cause for the French Revolution?
Considering the way we manufacture Ideas as we speak, this is very
possible.
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“When the pot-roast was particularly bad,
we turned to debating the existence of God. The good Lord always was
with the majority. Only three at the table held atheistic views; yet
they too listened to reason if we had at least a good cheese for dessert”
(Heinrich Heine).
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My
grandmother was a very down to earth person. I owe my existence to her
conceited ways. Yet all this common sense and survival skill didn’t
prepare her for this confrontation with the weird and wonderful.
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Her husband was
shipped in a
sealed boxcar to Auschwitz. The guards rushed him to undress and he was
told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that “later he could find it again.”
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People
have expressed their interest to actually lay money on the table if I
would publish my biography. Very flattering, but I am not sure I will
expand very much beyond this little sketch.
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Limited
shelf space can be a blessing. Most of my books are stored away in the
loft. So, from time to time I make a review of my references on shelf
and look what I really, really want. Then I climb upstairs.
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For most people it
was not the letter that was holding together their recollections and
ideas. It was the rhythm, figures of
speech, a hypnotic rhyme. The scanning of words became a science. For
a long time this was thought to guarantee the accuracy of our
traditions. |
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Personally
I think the Universe is teeming with life, perhaps even in the voids
between the galaxies. But if E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit
us? Is there an insurmountable barrier?
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Instead of a linear
progression, Professor Hawking proposes a permanent one-off, something
beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. Hawking doesn’t mean
to say that expansion and contraction occur in a cycle of infinite
repetitions, but that the whole process is laid out and suspended in a
timeless hyper-dimension of simultaneous occurrences.
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Given the seemingly
irrational character of some of our taboos, does our morality not defy
such explanation? It is all good and well to ascribe to a code of
high-minded ethics – the morals we believe we should observe – but
that’s not the morals we actually do observe. So what is really at the
core of our moral makeup? |
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I
had a conversation with a very down to earth Yorkshire woman, a retired
nurse. For her every thought of an afterlife held the horrors of
prolonged infirmity, “and why should
anybody want this,” she said. Why indeed. But then she came up
with a surprise.
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Time is made up of
the stories we pass on to the future – and often these stories are not
true. We create golden ages that never were and we pick our heroes from
the muck of poorly documented periods.
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