Monday, February 18, 2008

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

You have got to love a novel that begins like this -
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!

I’ve been feeling down the past few weeks. Nothing concrete, just a general sense. It’s the sense of lightness that Kundera talks about in the first chapter – a kind of “what’s the point” lightness.

For me Nihilism has two sides; it can free you from the rules you've created in your mind or it can send you into despair. Even though I’m not usually a proponent of this philosophy I have a tendency to slip into its logic games when I’m feeling down. It flows easily when you feel that there are major forces in your life that you have no control over. So I’m going to put this book back on the shelf until I can get this thought monster under control.

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