(no subject)

[petermarcus]

Will I ever get to see the ending to my story?
Show me what it's for, make me understand it
I've been crawling in the dark looking for the answer
Is there something more than what I've been handed?
-- Hoobastank

That, my friends, is the goal of all introspection... Divination: the urge or perhaps even the primal drive to figure out what will happen.

The roots of divination in Homo sapiens go back to prehistory, from Cro Magnon burial rituals to the use of Stonehenge to the prophecies of every religion. Science itself is based in the murky fog of wondering what will happen. Less than a quarter of Sir Isaac Newton's writings were about Calculus or gravity, the rest were about numerology, biblical interpretation, alchemy, and astrology. Johannes Kepler's famous inverse square law is buried in a thick book probing the meaning of it all. It is a book of philosophy, with the mathematical formula tossed in as a curious oddity -- that some element of the universe could be actually be governed by math, imagine that!

8000 years of truly modern humanity; from tonight, way back to the retreat of the last large glaciers when civilizations could scratch out a living with some sort of meteorologic stability. In other words, we needed the ability to predict the weather enough to plant and harvest crops.

Every armchair philosopher has dusted off his or her life and tried to find some meaning. The goal may be importance in one's life, or making a difference, or fame, or wealth, or knowledge, or perhaps just to love and be loved. Do we rise to our own vision of ourselves? Are we where we would like to be when we are old and grey and looking back upon it all?

Would I (more from the song): "... dedicate / And sacrifice my everything for just a second's worth / Of how my story's ending"? I have actually asked myself this in complete seriousness, three times in my life. In all cases, if honestly presented the chance, I don't think I would. Like a hardboiled detective mystery, it may be fun to try to guess the end, but knowing the ending is a different matter.

The game of life is the only game in town.

Comments

[gringo-in-tj.livejournal.com]

All that I can say is, great minds must think alike!

Except that you actually put these fine words into a great perspective, and you do that very, very well :)

[petermarcus.livejournal.com]

I only started to get into these guys in the last week. They just hit the rotation in the local radio station. And, if I've never said so before, I do love your taste in music. You're a little more into the punk funk like RATM than I am, but music in the last four or five years has really been rocking, hasn't it?

Re:

[gringo-in-tj.livejournal.com]

Yep! The thing that I love about Rage is the combination of the message and the music, I mean, they sometimes get a little funky, but there's just enough rock fused into it for my liking. Sadly, they are no more - de la Rocha left the band. I hear he wants to do hip-hop (I think that he's a moron, but he writes well and his voice fits that RATM style).

But yeah, we do see eye to eye musically ;)