maybe this is just me being pretentious

‘Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas‘ – Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher

Translation: The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.

Sometimes I think philosophy is just a bunch of intellectual bullshit created to fill our empty heads (when everything I read doesn’t really make sense); yet other times I think – hey, maybe this isn’t so bad after all.

On Friday, Rose shared a statistic she read somewhere, about how only one per cent of the world gets to go to university. Which made me think: shit, this is something we take so much for granted – the chance to learn and understand the world a little bit better.

And this is me procrastinating from writing my Philosophy essay worth a whooping 40% and due tomorrow by 4:45pm, boo!

Protected: this space we cannot fill

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

The Improvement

by John Ashbery

Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity -
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins.

We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.

I wake up, my face pressed
in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there’s a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate.
See, our lips bend.

something about being

disconcerted
disengaged
discontented
displaced
disconnected
distant

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This is my personal disaffection.

I want to wake up kicking and screaming
I want to live like I know what I’m leaving
I want a heart that I know is beating,
It’s beating,
I’m bleeding

And now you’re wondering -
Was peace just a temporary state?

It’s not that we’re scared… it’s just that it’s delicate.

So why do you fill my sorrow
With the words you’ve borrowed
From the only place you’ve known
And why do you sing Hallelujah
If it means nothing to you
Why do you sing with me at all?

- Damien Rice