Thursday, May 30, 2013

Take Off Your Sunglasses

Thank god the sun is finally out!

Now we can all hide behind our sunglasses again.

It's been hard, this long, long, long, long winter. Not because of the cold, we can handle that. No, it's enduring society with the naked eye for such a long stretch of time that gradually wears us down.

Without an intermediate, a manipulative lens, the cold, harsh truths around us are just too much to bear. Our sunglasses are the television screens of the outside world (an analogy that Google's frightening new Glasses are bound to hammer home in the next couple of years). They allow us to observe our direct surroundings as if they are at the other side of the world; or, even better, fictional.

Wearing our glasses is like a spiritual recharge, the Western world's equivalent of meditation. Watch the colors fade towards muddling mediocrity and sigh with relief as the distance between you and where you are grows. We feel invisible and therefore invincible. All of us turn into Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts of Traal, assuming that our cores, our true selves, cannot be seen, since we can no longer see the true colors of others.

If, just once, we would look long enough into the sun, we would never need our sunglasses again.

When we go blind, we don't just black out. We see, forever, a canvas containing everything we've ever seen, all of it panoplied before us as we last beheld it. Those who claim to have gone blind in shaded darkness have simply never truly seen anything.

Are you ready to take off your sunglasses?

Friday, May 17, 2013

Borges, Borges, Always Borges

Jorge Luis Borges - The Just:

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafĂ© in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.