AT THE STOA

"I am too weak to take my own life, but I am too strong to be granted madness." I have no idea where that line came from now, if it's my head or a bastardization of something I read (in all likelihood it is the second that is true. As with most things, I don't know if this is in my head or not). This line, of being just aware of how weak you are in the chaos of everything your mind or environment puts you through, while at the same time of how marginally strong you are because you are still marginally able to function, might be descriptive of what besets people with anxiety, or with a hyperawareness of life itself, or those who are unceasingly conscious of how they are alive. (Paradoxically, in being hyperaware of how one is, one forgets that one is, but that's another creature altogether.) For is it not weakness that prevents you from ending it all finally? And / But is it also not strength that you can still even think of how chaotic life is, meaning that yo...

I am not certain where to start, since I have always already started, and as Derrida would have it, "We are always beginning, wherever we are." The profundity in that statement is equal to its tautologicality, which is further equaled only by its full-willed and open-eyed resignation to whatever and wherever you are. As Pratchett would have it, "We are here, and this is now." Or if you want, the Romans have simplified it to what is an adverb, but is really an injuction: hic et nunc .  Here and now. Always already a here and now, whatever it contains. Throwing in two very simple but elegant (those two are also equal, not deserving the but ) phrases out of two massive thinkers is not a good way to begin, but what is a good way to begin? We can never get proper traction in asking ourselves that question, for we are always already here, if only so that question can be asked. The question - and all questions - come a split second after the fact of our being facts. An...