2024-08-21
I happened yesterday to flick through Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, which I still haven't read fully - I began to read it but ended up giving up a hundred pages in (it's very dry reading...). I do want to try pick it up again, maybe a chapter a day... not right now though. Maybe it would help me fix the problem I'm having where I can't really philosophise at the moment...
Anyways, I saw a quote in the book, page 480, from Euripides, which goes (quotes are a fantastic way to pad out words... not that that is the intent):
Volare pennis scelera ad aetherias domus Putatis, illic in Iovis tabularia Scripto referri; tum Iovem lectis super Sententiam proferre? - sed mortalium Facinora coeli, quantaquanta est, regia Nequit tenere: nec legentis Iuppiter Et puniendis par est. Est tamen ultio Et, si intuemur, illa nos habitat prope.
Or, in English roughly:
Do you believe, that crimes fly up on wings to the gods? yet further that someone writes them up on Zeus' tablet and Zeus, seeing them, speaks good to the people? Not even all of heaven is large enough to contain human sin, if Zeus would write them up; nor could he look over them and assign to each his punishment. No! The punishment is here already, if you could only see.
I am rambling because I don't know it too well, but I understand that in Orthodoxy heaven and hell are the same eschaton, and it is to do with perception...
For Christianity, I find a decent portion of it quite believable, if interpreted as metaphorical in a way... Heaven and hell as concepts I have never been able to understand. It seems to be in a way disjunct to the rest of the philosophy, or at least cannot be interpreted through the lens of Quality and Platonism...
It is strange that I no longer have the philosophical outbursts. I used to, when writing, end up thinking about philosophy, but at the moment I don't do that much. I wonder if it is just based on what I am doing at the moment.
I read Parmenides today. I really didn't understand very much of it at all. I never do understand overmuch when I read Platonic dialogues, and always think I need to come back to them to see whether I can actually make heads or tails of them, but this time especially (having not read any Plato for several months now) I understood essentially nothing, reading words, thinking: how many times can the word 'being' come up in one sentence? It was good though, and I do enjoy it. I just wish my mind was in that sort of space a little more.
And so, I will, when I find time, try to read a little more in the way of Plato, or Schopenhauer, or Kant if I can bring myself to it, or anything, really. I haven't read much at all, and certainly little of philosophy. I wish I could think about it again: it brought such a light to my life that is now severely missing. Nothing but deadlines I fail on, and things I am guilty of not doing, and improvement that is happening too slowly.
The punishment is here already: a life without philosophy is painful, it seems. Augustine did say philosophy was for the joy of man. I don't think I really enjoy life at the moment, though I guess I'm still living. I'm not depressed.
Talking of... (and padding to a thousand words)
I've never been the type to get overly depressed. I did as a teenager, and especially during my A-levels I spent a very long time in what I couldn't bring myself to call depression, but what certainly was.
Largely, I'm good at managing my mood, except for when my sleep gets bad. A few days of poor sleep can wreak havoc on my mood, which is likely why I'm feeling so lacklustre at the moment. Then again, I don't feel the same overwhelming joy I did beforehand when I would wake up early and get lots of work done, or get a lovely, rested night's sleep. I'm not sure that's really happened for awhile now.
Do I get winter depression? Looking at the past few years, I'm not sure. I think my mood does get a little lower, and certainly my job satisfaction gets a bit lower, though I have interspersed moments at almost every point in the year where I don't feel happy at my job. In fact, I really liked where I was before now, but felt a little unhappy coming up to the end of year. I felt bad in November, and got the new job in July. I think I felt pretty bad even when I started the new job, though, and have these periods where I feel intermittently like I don't enjoy work. At other times it's not amazing, but acceptable. In life generally, I don't like certain aspects of winter (like the inability to do any work outside past four o'clock) but strangely like aspects too (the romance of going to and leaving work in the dark) and sleep fairly well owing to the cold - about fifteen degrees is the warmest I can sleep well, and I like the ability to be too cold at night and wrap up warm, as opposed to being too warm and having to lie, uncovered, hoping that the suffering and pain will end, that accompanies early summer (by midsummer I am mostly acclimatised).
Is autumn my least favourite season then? The dark days without the cold nights.
I do wonder what it's like to be truly, badly depressed. I can manage my mood decently, and act fairly well to be in a good mood, but of course experience horrid ruts. I wonder if I'll struggle this winter. I feel as if, because I'm already not in a good place mentally this summer (or, I'm allowing myself not to be to get something else material) I'll struggle over winter when I haven't the vitamin D. Or perhaps it'll be alright: without the worry of the allotment, I can have more time to read, and think, and recover.
I'll see, I guess. It'll be fine in the end. Horrid feelings and pain are all a part of life, part and parcel.
I sort of want to go to Italy. To see a different country, and to have time by myself. I think I need a couple weeks by myself: I can probably afford to do a week in the Lake District (or elsewhere) by myself, and a trip to Italy, or Germany, or Norway, or somewhere that is foreign. I feel bad about the carbon emissions from the plane, but I need to remember I take the train three times a week at least, so I'm hardly carbon neutral. It won't hurt, just once. Many people fly several times a week. I'm doing it once this year, and maybe more, or maybe less in the future. I'm not a disgusting person for it.
Italy and the Lake District, two weeks to myself... it sounds romantic.
Yes, I should get around to booking that.
Ok, have a good one.
(p.s. I notice how much my thoughts jump from one topic to the other here. I wonder if that is good, or not. It is very stream-of-consciousness-type writing, but in a way perhaps too unordered, unstructured... is it a symbol of a short attention span that I flit from one idea to the next, I wonder?
Anyways, I deserve to go to bed now. I want a good night's sleep. Hopefully writing most of this before bed doesn't hurt me too badly.)