You can’t kill something that’s already dead. Just leave my soul alone…

posted on December 27, 2011

♬♫♪: Wintersleep – “Weighty”

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Reading: Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult

This year was so incredibly powerful and beautiful. This year was so brutal and breath-taking. This year saw dictators fall and people rise. This year saw mother nature’s wrath and human kind’s limitations. This year saw how cruel people could be. This year saw the birth of the 7th billionth person.

This year my eyes were opened to my own bigotry I have toward Muslims of how I try to simplify their beliefs when I can’t even wrap my head around the religion I’m surrounded by: Christianity. This year my eyes were opened to beginning to see Islam as another viable worldview and not just a misogynistic archaic and hateful religion.

This year my eyes were opened to how much I’ve learned about microbiology & philosophy. This year my eyes were opened to how much I’ve learned about microbiology graduate school culture. This year my eyes were opened to how good I truly have it being in college in the midwest of America. This year, my eyes were opened to how things are more complicated than black and white guidelines. This year my eyes were opened to how much I don’t know.

And so below, here are four excerps of various forms of art that I’ve found powerful or that have spoken to me in some way.

“… And, in fact, we find that the more a cultivated reason applies itself with deliberate purpose to the enjoyment of life and happiness, so much the more does the man fail of true satisfaction. And from this circumstance there arises in many, if they are candid enough to confess it, a certain degree of misology, that is, hatred of reason, especially in the case of those who are most experienced in the use of it, because after calculating all the advantages they derive, I do not say from the invention of all the arts of common luxury, but even from the sciences (which seem to them to be after all only a luxury of the understanding), they find that they have, in fact, only brought more trouble on their shoulders, rather than gained in happiness; and they end by envying, rather than despising, the more common stamp of men who keep closer to the guidance of mere instinct and do not allow their reason much influence on their conduct. ”
→ Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

I got out of bed today. Swear to God I couldn’t see my face. I got out of bed today staring at a ghost, who forgot to float away, didn’t have all that much to say…wouldn’t even tell me his own name. Where’d my body go?

Where oh where’d my body go? Africa or Mexico? Where or where’d my body go? Where’d my body go?

Have you seen my ghost? Staring at the ground? Have you seen my ghost? Sick of those goddamn clouds.
→ ♪♫ Wintersong – “Weighty”

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”
→ Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

“No people whose word for “yesterday” is the same as their word for “tomorrow” can be said to have a firm grip on the time.” → Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

4 days until a new year, just some thoughts and questions I’m taking into the new year with me. What is something(s) you learned this year? What is something you’re glad to leave in this year? What’s inspired you this year? Enlighten me :)

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