Tuesday, October 29, 2013

October 29th: Daimons, coincidences, tragedies, &c.

FRONT MATTER

Halloween is coming up; be thinking about the dead.
 
- Read other people's blogs.
- Blog about 'The Storyteller'.


IMPORTANT TERMS/INTERESTING TIDBITS

Animism - 'Animating spirit', "What gets you out of bed in the morning."

Daimon, Daemon - A benevolent or guiding spirit, a demon in the archaic sense of the word, an animal spirit that is a part of you.

"To give heed to coincidence is to give rise to further coincidences." - Vladimir Nabokov

Anagnorisis - A moment of critical discovery; a decisive moment.

"Oedipus is perhaps the most exemplary example of a Greek hero..."
Other examples:
- Superman
- Moses
- Harry Potter
- Heracles
- Jesus

    'Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'
       - The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats 

'One fell swoop...' - Shakespeare


ET CETERA

The Homeric worldview: 'It's better to be alive than dead.'
"We only have one shot at it. We only have our one moment in the sun. And we can either do it, or not."

"Tragedy is 'Better to have never been born.'
Now that's bleak, is it not, boys and girls?"

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