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| QUOTATIONS 64-98 |
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| 64. Conversation was the favourite pastime in ancient Greece, especially for those living in the democratic city-state like Athens. Moreover, the claim can be made, that the art of conversation was not only the product of democratic society but first and foremost its very basis. It stems from the nature of conversation in general and dialogue in particular, as the most egalitarian form of human interaction, since ideally it presupposes the social and intellectual equality of interlocutors and their right to speak freely. And theirs was the real freedom of speech when each individual was both, and to the same degree, a speaker and a listener, as opposed to the modern version of it, when the powerful few had virtually monopolized rights to and means of public discourse, thus effectively reducing the overwhelming majority of population to the role of passive listeners. For all these socio-political reasons and also because of the sheer enjoyment they derived from it, the ancient Greeks loved to converse. But in order to converse, those who do it had to understand what each of them was saying. And since what they were saying, they were saying in words, these words had to have the same meaning for everyone. Thus they were faced with the problem of defining the meanings of words which could be acceptable to all. For this reason the definition of words became, for a time being, the main preoccupation of ancient Greeks. And while they were defining the meanings of words, they also had to define the reality those words were describing. As a result, the description and explanation of the reality became their another favourite preoccupation. The next inevitable step was to find the connection between the words and the reality, the spiritual and the physical, the idea and the matter, etc., etc. Philosophy was born! Thus again, the claim could be made that the art of conversation - and ancient Greeks unquestionably had elevated conversation into the highest art form - was not only the basis of democracy, but also the foundation of the Greek philosophy which in its turn became the corner stone of the Western civilization. 65.Contemporary culture in general and today's art in particular tend to trivialize that which is significant and to present as significant that which is trivial. Furthermore, the modern culture tends to pathologise the normal and normalize the pathological. 66. All life is predicated on death. No living organism is self-sufficient and self-contained. In order to live one must consume somebody or something else. The success of any living species manifests itself in an increased consumption which leads to: 1) proliferation of this species, and 2) enlargement of its individual representative. These two factors produce an effect of even bigger consumption which in turn results in further proliferation and enlargement of the species, and so on, and so forth. Eventually, if left unchecked, the continuation of such an ever increasing consumption can destroy the very environment that serves as a feeding ground for the species. And this, naturally, will cause their own destruction. Their only "salvation" lies in presence in the same environment of the other species which consumes them and thus limits their numbers. Such a circular process of "eating and being eaten" can keep the whole system in equilibrium until one member of the circle, through its superior adaptation to the environment, becomes the last consumer in the chain, viz. nobody consumes him. Having achieved such predominance this particular species would eventually, through their ever increasing numbers and size, destroy the very environment which had been so beneficial to their evolution and thus destroy themselves. Dinosaurs probably have done that, and now Man is rapidly moving in the same direction, helped by the artificially increasing ability provided by science and technology, to consume his environment at a dazzling speed, toward his own destruction. Man has defeated Nature. But being a part of Nature, he has also defeated himself. 67. When several different scenarios of the future are offered, one of them, by the sheer law of probabilities, is bound to happen. First of all, because the number of variations is usually limited, and the second because the majority of them are contradictory. Most of the times it is like "either... or...": either peace or war, either victory or defeat, either prosperity or disaster, etc. It also helps when an outline of the future events is rather sketchy and put into the vague and ambiguous terms. The more general these predictions are the more likely they will be regarded by the posterity as fulfilled, no matter what had actually happened. The Delphian oracles knew that, and so did the prophets of ancient Israel, and even less illustrious though much more ubiquitous fortune-telling gypsies know it today. When thus foretold events occur, the one whose predictions come true (of course, some adjustments and interpretations are always needed to bridge the gap between intellectual abstractions of the past and physical reality of the present) is declared by the admiring posterity to be the real prophet, the visionary, etc., while those less lucky, whose versions of the future didn't materialize, are dismissed as the false prophets and not only their name but even their predictions are forgotten. The contemporaries of both "real" and "false" prophets have, of course, no way of even guessing which of them is right because, as a rule, their prophecies contain no proof why any particular version of the future has to materialize. Therefore, the ones who are remembered and glorified forever have no more claim to foresight than a gambler who has won in a lottery. Besides, it is always the next generation that determines the winner. But by that time, it will be already living in that "predicted " future and wouldn't need the dead prophet to tell it how it looks. Tomorrow's fool will know more Than a seer who had died before How will the distant future look there is no answer in a book The prophecy, one must confess, is nothing but a wild guess. Yet, it is very difficult for people, both individually and collectively, to admit that the future is essentially unknown and unpredictable, because to admit this means to accept that there is no order in human life, that it is chaotic and, in a sense, has no purpose or meaning. That's why we are always desperately looking for prophets and visionaries who could serve as the living symbols of illusive order and meaning for all of us. 68. What would the ancient Egyptians, who kept their way of life and government comparatively unaltered for more than 3000 years, have said about our unquenchable thirst for the perpetual and very often instantaneous change? Or Ecclesiastes, who had found that "there is nothing new under the sun", what would he have said about the "new and improved'? Are we, the western men, such true followers of Heraclitus that we cannot "step into the same river twice"? And yet, we are surprisingly comfortable when things stay the same as they are, and we always live as much in the past as in the future. Almost infinite numbers of memoirs (at least that's the way one feels sometimes), countless books, describing growing up in the prairies, or in up-state New-York, or in some other, equally god-forsaken place, the whole industry of nostalgia, is the best testimony to it. On the whole, our western civilization reminds one of a child rushing into the world of new experiences and discoveries, while constantly looking back not to loose the sight of a mother. 69. He, who remembers the past and project it onto the future, will never be happy. One always shall recognize a Jew, by sadness in his eyes; the memories of things that passed, the fear they will forever last, cast the dark cloud, for his mind cannot leave History behind. 70. A dog in possession of a bone is absolutely sure that everybody wants a bone and especially his bone which is quite a natural behaviour for a dog. 71. We live in a world of rising expectations and diminishing resources to satisfy them. This contradiction leads inevitably to the growing discontent of the masses, who are always looking for the culprits. Communist rulers of the Eastern Europe and military dictators of the Third World are only the first victims of this discontent. As of now, the people of the World are looking at USA and Western Europe and see two parallel phenomena: political system of democracy and economic prosperity. So, they equate one with the other. The argument in the collective psyche of the people of the "developing" or "stagnating" countries has been so far very simple - democratic countries prosper economically, ours are both undemocratic and poor, therefore in order to prosper we have to become democratic as well. It is, however, up to the future, which is never too far nowadays, to prove whether the conclusion of this argument - prosperity is the product of democracy - is the correct one, or it constitutes a fallacy of accidental correlation. At the present moment the jury is still out. But if the second is true, and the democratic capitalism stops delivering to the ever increasing expectations (and there are numerous indicators that's what is happening already), then, despite the incessant lulling chant by the bourgeois ideologists and propagandists that democratic capitalism is not only the best but the only option now, they and their bosses are setting themselves up for a rude awakening. For the dissatisfied populace of the West would eventually do to their capitalist rulers what the discontented masses of the East had done to their communist counterparts. There is no such thing as the finality either in human affairs or ideas. Anything can be discarded, anything can be embraced anew. As a matter of fact, people would often recycle tomorrow what they rejected yesterday. History and Life is one and the same, and until Life is over, History is not over either. 72. People are both addictive and allergic to truth. They are addictive to the truth about others and allergic to the truth about themselves. 73. As can be learned from history any specific injustice, no matter how long it existed, eventually ends, like , for example, slavery. But the same history also tells us that after this or that particular injustice is removed, it is inevitably replaced by another one, as for instance, slavery had been replaced by serfdom. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is time for everything, the time for destroying an old injustice and the time for creating a new one. Such a ruthless inevitability almost forces one to start believing in the existence of some Universal Injustice which like the Platonic Form is eternal, while its particular manifestations are constantly changing, with one being destroyed while another being born in its place. 74. Sooner or later even the most revolutionary ideology or religion get accepted by those against whom it had been originally directed, after being transformed and adopted to their advantage. 75. At its best, Poetry is the confession of a soul, at its worst - the incriminating evidence against it, but in both cases it is its life story. 76. Good is proud of being unique, Evil justifies itself by being common. 77. Whatever we are talking about we are always talking about ourselves. 78. Metaphor is a bridge between the concrete and abstract, the immediate and transcendent, the trivial and sublime, the material and spiritual. 79. Few seek knowledge and understanding in order to share it, to impart and thus to enable the others to know and understand too. The majority, however, look at knowledge and understanding as the means to gain advantage over those possessing neither, as a superior weapon to defeat them. Like a miser hoarding his wealth, the knowledgeable and the informed jealously guard their possession to use it only as a currency of the exchange but never to give it away for free. When, forced by circumstances, they have to give up some of their knowledge and expertise or to explain, however unwillingly, anything to anybody, they often try their best to be as vague and ambiguous as possible in order to mislead and confuse. All in all, it's hard to say what is greater - the material stinginess of the rich or the intellectual miserliness of the knowledgeable, and which is more obnoxious. 80. The price of admission into "collectivity" is the surrender of "individuality" at the entrance. 81. Every human being is endowed with the inalienable rights of self-determination of one's life, up to the separation from Life itself. 82. A mannequin dressed up in different clothes is still the same mannequin. 83. Vanity will always find something to feed on; and, even if there is nothing, it will feed on itself. 84. The representatives of the British so called " upper middle class" are easily recognizable by the self-justified pomposity of their speech and behaviour. But what presents a really preposterous spectacle is an attempt by a member of the British working class, when in a company of foreigners, to imitate, like the Moliere's would-be-gentleman, such behaviour, in hope that they wouldn't be able to tell a genuine article from a fake. 85. A "religious thinker" is a contradiction in terms; for whereas religion is the product of faith, thinking is the product of reason, and faith and reason are in direct contradiction to each other. 86. There is a permanent conflict between idealism of an individual and materialism of the crowd. One is looking for self-expression, the many are preoccupied with the everyday living. An idealist, if successful in his self-actualizing singular pursuit, becomes this rare phenomenon - a hero and as such is doomed to destruction, sooner or later. But the crowd must and shall survive, so it can go on and continue to produce idealistic heroes, who are the expression of its longing to rise above the trivial and mundane, to break the bonds of the flesh and to soar into the realm of the spirit. It doesn't mean, of course, that "hero production" is the main purpose of human existence, but it unquestionably plays important part in the psychological survival of the crowd. One only has to look at the recorded history to realize how much it resembles the "who's who" of the past three thousand years. The crowd lives vicariously through its idealistic heroes. They are the ones doing what we all would like but don't dare to do. At the same time such a symbiotic relationship inevitably produces ambiguity, for we want our heroes both to succeed and to fail. Their success gives us hope, their failure justifies our passivity and lack of resolve. And so, we sacrifice them because of who they are, and we worship them for the same reason. Yet, on rare occasions the idealistic hero manages to infect the cautious crowd with his idealism and heroism. Then it forgets for a moment its preoccupation with survival and, in joining him, becomes a collective hero, ready to sacrifice itself. And this is called "revolution". But it never lasts long. Sooner or later the instinct of mass self-preservation prevails, and the crowd returns to its usual ways again. As the earth brings forth the flowers, So heroes spring up from the crowd. But heroes, like the flowers, are short-lived, While the earth and the crowd abide forever. 87. A conflict between Jesus and the Jews of the New Testament is a conflict between the idealism of an individual, beholding the transcendent, and the materialism of the crowd, preoccupied with the immediate. He wants to transform their souls - they demand miracles to cure their bodies and to fill their stomachs. Even his disciples, at whom Jesus pointed and said, "Look! Here are my mother and my brothers", seemed to be deaf to this message. The growing realization of his inability to change people brings the continuous disappointment and bitterness to him. Jesus begins to hate the materialistic nature of man. In a fit of desperation, he "drives out of the temple all who were buying and selling there and overturns the tables of the money-changers". Feeling defeated and rejected, Jesus is pushed half-willingly by the current of events toward what seems to him more and more as the best and the only fitting conclusion of his mission - martyrdom. Overcome, yet undeterred by gnawing fear and doubts -"the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" - he all but stages his last miracle - his own death and resurrection. And the miracle did happen as it had happened before and would happen after, again and again throughout human history - an idealistic hero, either despised and persecuted or simply ignored while alive, becomes the subject of worship after his death. It happens because it isn't a man who is being resurrected but the idea, which freed from the embodiment of the mortal flesh of an individual, gets embraced by the crowd and immortalized through it. Thus the conflict is resolved - the dead hero becomes a living god. 88. Blessed are those who are longing, for they know not what they are longing for. 89. Nowadays, as the mannequins are beginning to look more and more like real people, and people more and more like the mannequins, one is faced with the dilemma - whether to celebrate the improvement of the copy or to lament the deterioration of the original. 90. Some people spend all their lives looking for somebody to spend their life with. 91. We are judged not only by the way we live but also by the way we die. Sometimes the later carries much more weight in forming an opinion about us than the former. 92. Oh, the disappointment of a prophet who, having predicted the end of the world at midnight, wakes up the next morning to find out it is still here. 93. This is the progress of knowledge at its most basic and fundamental: what we do not know yet, we always measure by what we already know, until this "unknown" becomes "known" to us and, in its turn, is used to measure the next "unknown", and so on and so forth. Thus, anything new has to be described in the terms of the old, which are modified in the process, assuming more or less new forms, and then, through the long usage, eventually become sufficiently old themselves to be used later in a similar manner. All knowledge, therefore, is interconnected in one all-encompassing Whole and any division of it is more or less artificial. 94. The dialogue that does not contain the mutually accepted axioms ( which in itself still allows different opinions on any particular subject) sooner or latter becomes incomprehensible to both sides. 95. Not being afraid of being wrong is a necessary precondition for any open and meaningful conversation. 96. Beware of those who sound perfectly convincing, for they are usually the perfect liars. 97. One cannot have many friends while remaining true to oneself. 98. I am alone even in my dreams. |
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