Substack Notes Roundup #5
Light, darkness, art, and more...
This is the 5th collection of my most recent Substack notes. Enjoy!
“Better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.”
— William Lonsdale Watkinson
“A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.”
— C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
How to connect with nature, starting today:
Go on hikes (no phone except for emergency)
Swim in the sea as often as possible
Travel as often as possible
Go for picnics
Walk over short distances or use a bike instead of commuting
Wake up slightly before sunrise
Get some morning sunlight in your eyes
Walk barefoot whenever possible
Watch the sunset every night
Add yours accordingly.
Nature is infinitely beautiful. Stop recording, start experiencing.
Every summer I come back to him. I can’t seem to forget the beauty and the horror. One look at the night sky and it all comes flooding in. What an absolutely mesmerizing and hauntingly attractive universe he brought to life.
Lovecraft came into contact with the most primitive of human emotions; that of fear, and specifically the fear of the unknown. One cannot help but shudder inexplicably when reading his stories; they seem to touch the human psyche in the most fundamental level, manifesting thoughts that cannot be put into words. The terrifying reality of our existence, that which puts us on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, is an innate feeling of evolutionary origin. If we can contemplate death then we can wonder about our place among the stars.1
There are three kinds of people when it comes to dealing with the problem of Time: the unsatisfied, the hedonist, and the appreciative.
The unsatisfied looks only ahead and lives for milestones. When one milestone is reached another takes its place. It's the Myth of Sisyphus all over again only he believes the torment will end with each ascent.
The hedonist cares not for tomorrow and plunges himself in pleasures. Eventually he ends up bored or worse mentally and physically ruined. We've seen way too many examples of that unfortunately.
The appreciative however has his feet planted firmly in the present while gazing in a potentially bright future. He appreciates each moment with his family while knowing it won't last forever. He runs and hikes and swims, fully immersed while accepting that his body will one day break down.
Regardless of your type, change is inevitable. The sky, the sea and the mountains will always be there. It is us that will one day disappear.
But eternity exists in impermanence.
Plan ahead and never miss a moment of the present.
Be grateful.
“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.”
— Carl Jung
“The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nonetheless neither is the sole support of the other. Artist and work are each, in themselves and in their reciprocal relation, on account of a third thing, which is prior to both; on account, that is, of that from which both artist and artwork take their names, on account of art.”
— Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art
“The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, ‘divine.’”
— Erich Neumann
“You have to generalize anybody in order to kill them.”
Whoa.
“My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights
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