A Sonnet to a Wayword Love, Who will not Hear it

Sonnet,Sleep Deprivation

Sleep, thou art unfaithful as a mistress -
And to a thinking man you are unkind;
For want of thee, I wander, ever hopeless,
Across the rocky crags of weary mind.
As Moses felt, those years behind the Jordan,
Or Magellan, long adrift on faceless sea -
So cursed am I - the moon to be my warden -
For vain desire I might spend my nights with thee.
Surely there are men to whom you're faithful -
What have they that is not found in me?
I know you hear no reason; mine is simple:
If you could be more true, we'd both be free.
For I'm not jealous, that no other man should have thee;
But rather, after all my love, you find no love for me.

The problem of Civilization

Civilization,Darwinism,Art,The Mind

Man is older yet than his civilization.  His actions pre-exist his works, and his languages are older than his words.  He was born into the world as part of it, and belonging to nothing else.  But man has become a seperate creature, and lives in means past living - in some strange action of time, he has stretched his roots into boundless air, and lives, for a time, beyond earth.

Darwin was very right about the development of living things through generations; the man that was too large found it difficult to feed himself sufficiently, and iether rose to the challenge dealt him or died a lean, aesthetic death.  Likewise the man who was too small: he would find more problems surviving when strength and force were called for, and may often have met grim deaths at the hands of larger fates.

But the problem of man is his mind. It is a fearful instrument, one that sees its own problems, and consciously seeks to correct them.  A squirrel knows enough to store food away - a man knows to grow it, to store it, and then to prepare it to be more than itself.  In doing so, he crosses many gaps that no other creature dares bridge.

Civilization has allowed man to be higher than beasts, but has made him less of a man.  With the aid of some civilized machine or domesticated beast, he finds need of lesser strength; his muscles weaken for ownership of an ox, or a push-cart, or an automobile, as surely as his efficiency increases.  The same is true not only of the farmer or wares-dealer, but also the mathematician, the facts-checker, and even the artist.  A photographer can now do with the push of a few buttons, over the span of a few seconds, things that his counterpart of a century earlier would labor over for hours - lighting, exposure, and stops, and the chemical treatment of a thousand little points to prepare himself for the moments he would spend with the shutter open.  This in itself streamlined and mechinised one of the key errands of the painter, who learned manually the tasks created by his many colors, and took to composing from scratch the forms he had chosen to render as image on a flat and empty surface. Today's photographer achieves his goal by pointing and pressing a button, and a very little more; his forebears did this same thing only after achieving complete knowledge of the human face, the shapes of fruit, the way things hang in the air when in motion, and then by mastering thier chosen media to reflect all this in one artistic product. The camera not make its user less of an artist; I do contend that it brings his mind to less use, and therefore, makes him less of a man.

This new century presents this same problem to virtually every expertice that a civilized human being can practice, bringing us farther away from the point at which we became experts at all.  This may indeed, be the century's problem; more likely, its downfall. The task at hand may be simplified by using a tool - but the same task will become incromprehensible to another when that tool is taken away. The greatness of the species is reduces, if not completely nullified if we do not use our minds to solve problems, and continue to use them even after the problem is solved.

On the Strange and Subtle Process of Beginnings

I am fairly certain – at least in the sense that I can be certain of little else – that I was born. And yet I have known others, met and spoken face to face with reasonable human beings who are willing to doubt their own existence. Perhaps it pleases them to throw out the only belief all sane men have always hither to agreed upon. More likely, they believe that we do not exist, not for their personal pleasure, but rather, for their personal rebuke. That is, they would rather live in the pain of willful disbelief than the pain of willfully believing anything – they confront the discomfort of uncertainty by giving up on anything certain and everything comfortable.

And so I begin with this – that I do believe in my own existence. Even if it seems silly, even if I seem in this moment to be merely sounding into this rough new world like a boy shouting “I am here!” into a canyon, I feel it is very important to say something. I am here – even and especially if I cannot be sure of why. Descartes would agree with me, I believe; but it must be noted some modern philosophy professors wouldn’t.

The point is that I am sitting in front of a dimly lit computer screen, which nevertheless rests un-contended as the brightest object in the room, and I sit typing at a quarter to two in the morning. The point is that I can’t sleep; and in the darkness of a noise-filled summer night in Texas, I have only my thoughts to rest upon.

That is why I begin – it is because I think. For the same reason, I believe in my own existence. From this vantage point, I might yet look past my dim computer screen and into the darkened rooms of human life, and from them, peer into the steely heavens, and look over all the slumbering earth, and find in these the answers to many questions. It is more possible that I will only find more questions to ask. But these are the risks. From this point on, I will write of things the way I examine them; all of these things I come across must be seen in the light of stable reason – and we will come to see, where reason fails, what follies are most noble – and we will see how far some common sense might take us. Come, then, and let us reason together – let us reason toward the places it may truly lead us.