Noroc,
Săptămâna aceasta vă bucur cu 2 articole noi (în engleză), pe lângă “usual stuff”:
● Things To Do During Quarantine, or How Not To Lose Your F*cking Mind – un articol mai cu umor pe care l-am scris recent. Îmi bat joc puțin de postările mele vechi de pe Facebook și vă dau niște sfaturi despre ocupații pe timpul carantinei (e un stil cu care experimentez în engleză și niște critică constructivă nu mi-ar încurca).
● On Not Being Good Enough – Mulți din noi (cel puțin eu) avem mentalitatea ori deprinderea de a ne mustra pe noi înșine, crezând că nu suntem destul de buni, nu suntem compleți. În acest articol eu argumentez prin prisma vieții unui scriitor vestit din Argentina că de multe ori această senzație de “I’m not good enough yet” e o iluzie și perpetuând asemenea comportament intri într-un ciclu negativ. Probabil voi traduce acest articol în română și voi înregistra vocea peste o săptămână, dar nu știu dacă e nevoie. Dă-mi de știre dacă merită să-l traduc.
● Free Will, Sam Harris – prima impresie a cărții vestitului neurolog și producător de podcast, Sam Harris. În Free Will el discută despre conceptul de liberul arbitru, ar fi el o iluzie sau realitate?
● The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot – un video realizat de The School Of Life despre importanța dansului “haotic” și potențialul lui de a ne transforma percepția despre viață și despre sinele nostru.
Un citat care mi-a atras atenția:
„Nu ştiu dacă sufletul unui filosof doreşte mai mult decât să fie un dansator bun.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Articolele pe care l-am scris recent:
Things To Do During Quarantine, or How Not To Lose Your F*cking Mind - I remember the times when I was a kid, and in moments of extreme boredom I’d ask my mom:
“Maaahm, I’m bored, what should I do?” (I didn’t have internet back then)
And mom would sarcastically answer:
“Grab your ass and jump”
To which I’d roll my eyes and commence the process of grabbing my ass and jumping on the bed, all while singing some random song from Power Rangers or some other stuff I’ve seen on the TV.
Every time I’m bored (which is rare nowadays, there’s never “enough time”) I remember the words my mom used to say and then I laugh to myself, imagining how ridiculous I would look if I grabbed my ass and jumped right now…
Because holy moly COVID-19 2020 it’s mother-flipping quarantine! And I’m sure you’re having lots of “fun” these days, travelling from your bed to the sofa and all the way to the fridge and back to your sofa… Phew, sweating out here, so much exercise, I can’t even…
Or you’re browsing the web in your unwashed pajamas and writing angry comments on Facebook about how the 5G antennas conspiracy is f*cking dumb as hell (which it is).
Or you’re watching all the shows on Netflix which are even remotely related to pandemics and viruses because WHY THE F*CK NOT, RIGHT?
Mind: Damn, I’m so paranoid about this virus, I don’t wanna hear anymore negative news…
Also Mind: WOAH, history of Spanish flu in 1918? Contagion? How to survive a pandemic? YES GIMME ALL THAT STUFF I’LL WATCH IT RIGHT NOW LET ME BINGE WATCH THE SH*T OUT OF IT.
Why do we do this? Are we masochists? Are all of us actually a bunch of kung-fu monks that like getting hit in the balls because we want to “build resistance”?
I don’t know, but it’s kind of amusing. I think it comes from our inability to stay bored. We’d rather do anything, literally anything, but be bored. It’s the way our weird brains are structured.
Which reminds me of a quote from a 17th century mathematician,
“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” — Blaise Pascal
It’s true, this avoidance of boredom is part of us, and sometimes it eats at us, it makes us go mad, but it’s also the driving force behind all human progress and creativity. Simply put, without boredom, and without us trying to avoid it, we wouldn’t be where we are now as a species. If the caveman wasn’t bored out of his mind, he wouldn’t have tried to learn to sharpen a rock or a stick, and subsequently he wouldn’t have been able to build weapons in order to fight the predators and get out of his cave and conquer the world. If some random dude didn’t start rubbing two sticks against each other, we wouldn’t have learned to start a fire. These are extremely simplified pictures in your head I’m trying to create, but you get the general idea — No boredom, no creativity; no creativity, no human development; no human development, no Facebook (?). Yeah, you get it.
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*Citește continuarea aici.
On Not Being Enough - In 1899, in the city of Buenos Aires, a boy was born. He was a shy boy who gradually overcame his shyness through writing fiction, being inspired by the stories of Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. To earn his living, he took a major post in 1938 at a Buenos Aires library. He remained there for nine unhappy years.
In 1938, the year his father died, the boy who was already a man suffered a severe head wound and subsequent blood poisoning, which left him near death, bereft of speech, and fearing for his sanity. At the age of 39, this experience appears to have freed in him the deepest forces of creation. In the next eight years he produced his best work, one that revealed for the first time his entire dreamworld, an ironical or paradoxical version of the real one, with its own language and systems of symbols.
In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind, due to a hereditary affliction that had also attacked his father and had progressively diminished his own eyesight from the 1920s onward. It had forced him to abandon the writing of long texts and to begin dictating (mostly poems) to his mother or to secretaries or friends. He later hinted on the irony and the timing of his blindness:
“No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch.”
His name was Jorge Luis Borges and his work became an important part of the classics of the 20th century. But he only got the popular acclaim in the 1960’s when he was older and already blind. He was even compared to the great Franz Kafka due to their similar styles. He was a troubled individual, and he often criticized his own work, feeling that it wasn’t good enough and that “he’d better be a man of action”.
He once wrote, “as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.”
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*Citește continuarea aici.
Cartea pe care o citesc acum:
Liberul Arbitru (“Free Will”, Sam Harris, 2012, versiunea Kindle) – Teza cărții în principiu e următoarea:
Nu avem libertatea și liberul arbitru pe care credem că o avem. Da, poți face alegeri conștiente, dar tot ceea ce alcătuiește acele alegeri conștiente (gândurile, dorințele tale) este determinat de cauze anterioare în afara controlului tău. Doar pentru că poți face ceea ce dorești nu înseamnă că ai liber arbitru pentru că nu alegi ceea ce dorești în primul rând.
Ideea îmi este cunoscută, dar aș vrea să încerc să o analizez critic, deoarece cunosc unele idei dezvoltate de alți intelectuali contemporani care nu sunt de acord cu concluziile lui Harris. Rămâne să-mi fac concluzia singur, odată ce finisez cartea (e scurtă).
Vă las cu un citat din carte care demonstrează un fapt extrem de curios despre creierul nostru, și care mai degrabă creează mai multe întrebări decât ne dă răspunsuri clare despre natura conștiinței umane.
“[În urma unui experiment cu aparatul fMRI] cercetătorii au descoperit două regiuni ale creierului care conțineau informații despre care buton ar apăsa participanții experimentului între 7 și 10 secunde înainte de luarea deciziei în mod conștient. Mai recent, înregistrările directe din cortex au arătat că activitatea a doar 256 de neuroni a fost suficientă pentru a prezice cu 80% exactitate decizia unei persoane de a se mișca 700 de milisecunde înainte de a fi conștientă de aceasta. Aceste descoperiri sunt dificil de reconciliat cu ideea că noi sunt autorii conștienți ai acțiunilor noastre. Un fapt pare acum incontestabil: Câteva momente înainte de a fi conștient de ceea ce vei face în continuare – un moment în care subiectiv se pare că ai libertate completă de a te purta oricum îți place, creierul tău a stabilit deja ce vei face. Apoi devii conștient de această „decizie” și crezi că ești în proces de luare a acesteia.” (pp. 8, 9)
Un video pe care l-am privit recent:
The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot – “One of the strangest but also most intriguing and redemptive things that humans get up to, in almost any culture one cares to study, is occasionally to gather in large groups, bathe in the rhythmic sounds of drums and flutes, organs and guitars, chants and cries, and move their arms and legs about in complicated and frenzied ways, losing themselves in the bewilderment of a dance. Dancing has a claim to be considered among the most essential and salutary activities we ever partake in. Not for nothing did Nietzsche, a painfully inhibited figure in day to day life, declare ‘I would believe only in a God who could dance’ (a comment that stands beside his equally apodictic pronouncement: ‘Without music, life would be a mistake.’)
But dancing is at the same time an activity that many of us, arguably those of us who might most need to do it, are powerfully inclined to resist and deep down to fear. We stand on the side of the dance floor appalled at the possibility of being called to join in, we attempt to make our excuses the moment the music begins, we take pains that no one will ever, ever see our hips unite with a beat.
The point here is definitely not to learn to dance like an expert, it is to remember that dancing badly is something we might actually want to do and, equally importantly, something that we already well know how to do to – at least to the level of appalling proficiency we need to possess in order to derive key benefits.
In almost all cultures and at all points of history (except oddly enough perhaps our own), dancing has been widely and publically understood as a form of bodily exercise with something very important to contribute to our mental state. Dancing has had nothing to do with dancing well, being young or revealing one’s stylishness. Summed up sharply we might put it like this: dancing has been valued for allowing us to transcend our individuality and for inducing us to merge into a larger, more welcoming and more redemptive whole.
The Ancient Greeks were for the most part committed worshippers of the rational mind. Their foremost God, Apollo, was the embodiment of cool reason and disciplined wisdom. However, the Greeks understood – with prescience – that a life devoted only to the serenity of the mind could be at grave risk of desiccation and loneliness. And so they balanced their concern with Apollo with regular festivals in honour of a quite different God, Dionysus, a god that drank wine, stayed up late, loved music – and danced.
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*Sau privește video-ul aici.
O întrebare asupra căreia poți medita:
Ce carte ai citit recent care te-a impresionat, și de ce?
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Vorbim peste o săptămână,
- Andrei