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Memores acti prudentes futuri


You're unsure if I am a loose end or a strand
that waits for you to mend or understand
A few words
"When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness."
~ D.H. Lawrence

"Is the meaning of life defined by its duration? Or does life have a purpose so large that it doesn't have to be prolonged at any cost to preserve its meaning?"

"Living is not good, but living well. The wise man, therefore, lives as well as he should, not as long as he can... He will always think of life in terms of quality not quantity... Dying early or late is of no relevance, dying well or ill is... even if it is true that while there is life there is hope, life is not to be bought at any cost."
~ Seneca

"People will tell you nothing matters, the whole world's about to end soon anyway. Those people are looking at life the wrong way. I mean, things don't need to last forever to be perfect."
~ Daydream Nation

"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories-- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."
~ The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

"The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road."
~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."
~ William Blake
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The monkey's paw
Friday, December 9, 2022
For a long time now, I've been interested in the themes of the monkey's paw. I had never actually read the story that the idea originated from until just now, but the idea of a wish coming true-- just not in the way you wanted-- is interesting to me. Clearly it's interesting to a lot of other people too, since the theme comes up not infrequently in popular media.

I don't believe in magic in any supernatural sense, but I still think often of the idea that you have to be careful what you want, because it may come to you in a way you don't want. I tend to add a lot of specifiers when I think about things I want and hope for. I'm also disinclined to express desire for things that are general/ambiguous.

For example, I would be wary of saying "I want love" because that could end up meaning a lot of things. Do I want to love someone? Be loved? What does "love" mean here? There's no broadly accepted definition of exactly what love looks like, so there's a huge amount of room for interpretation. People often expect that love will manifest in certain actions, but it could also be just a feeling. For all I know, if I wished for love and my wish was granted, I could be loved by someone I would never meet, but who had seen me once somewhere and become struck with the idea of me. Or perhaps I could meet someone I would fall for who would never reciprocate my feelings.

I guess if anything, I tend to use this prompt as a jumping off point for philosophical questions and refinement of understanding. If I said "I want someone to love me" it raises the question of what "me" means. For a lot of people that's an easy question because they don't think about identity, but if someone becomes infatuated with your image and knows nothing about your personality, is it fair to say they love you? Or what if you get dementia to the point of losing your ability to communicate entirely and they love what they used to know of you?

And of course, since this is roughly about the monkey's paw, if you said "I want someone to love me" with no time conditions, it could very well happen that you happen to meet someone who loves you but is also prone to a murder/suicide type deal and enacts their "love" in that way.

So yeah, qualifiers. Qualifiers make a difference.
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