All, The Philosophy of Serendipity or The PoS.
As the rain poured and out of something new to read Thursday evening I scanned my bookshelves for something uplifting with philosophical overtones. I settled on a novel that starts serendipitously on the Thursday evening before Easter at 4:00PM and ends at 5:50AM the Monday morning after it. I read a little too fast for perfect synchronization finishing it again last night but I think I may have started a new Easter tradition for myself. But next time maybe it would be neat to follow the timeline closer to the one laid out in the book. One of the philosophical points of the book is captured in this passage: "Sarah Bernhardt was such a powerfully popular, awe-inspiring actress that when she toured in North America her performances invariably sold out, even though she spoke hardly a work of English. Whatever play she did, Shakespeare, Moliere, Marlowe, or whatever, she did in French, a language few nineteenth century Americans could comprehend. Theatergoers were provided with libretto so the might follow the action in English. Well, on at least a couple of occasions, ushers passed out the wrong libretto, a text for an entirely different drama that the one that was being staged. Yet, from all the reports, not once did a single sole in those capacity crowds ever comment or complain. Furthermore, on critic ever mentioned the discrepancy in his or her review."... "We modern human beings a looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue- only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text we have been given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine and Reader's Digest, daily papers and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcom, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe barroom melodramas or kindergarten skits." (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas-Tom Robbins-1994) In life we are all unconsciously writing our own librettos mostly out of bits and pieces of others. In the spring, at Easter, it's probably better to go out and watch nature's play leaving your libretto at home. Dave Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
