“The present life of man, O king, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like the swift flight of the sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers and a good fire in the midst, while the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of sight into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but what of went before or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.”
This is the image of a man’s life through the thoughts and cognition of Venerable Bede (c673-735), the flight of a sparrow through the warmth and light of a great hall and back into the blizzard has troubled thinkers for centuries. What depresses me is that I don’t eat “supper” in a great banqueting hall, I usually sit in a confined room, on a chair that hurts my bum with it on my lap. As for the sparrow, the most prolific domineers of the sky where I live are Bloody Seagulls! So my updated Bede analogy would be: Life is basically a seagull taking a cumbersome passage through my room at dinner time (greedily swallowing as much as possible on its course) and back out into the putrid effluent of the atmosphere beyond my window where it belongs.
Have been considering forming a new group: The Society for the Pointless Promotion of Pessimism.
I managed to get the mp3 player to work in IE as you may see. But it will not autoplay in IE as it does in Firefox, in IE you need to click play, I would like it to load the playlist but wait for someone to press play before it plays any tunes, this maybe possible. Although I’m going to turn the autoplay off as it will make loading the page slow for people with dial-up connections to the internet. Also now have a nice gap in the sidebar!
1 hour later…
HAHA…. It doesn’t work does it!!! Well I’m going to go and batter my head against a brick wall for an hour or two.
An interesting point was brought to my attention today, the fact that the mollecular structure of an atom could be influenced by the mere perception of it. A bit like connecting a volt meter across the a resistive circuit, the (high) resistance of the meter will affect the value of the final measurement. This is delving into quantum theory just a bit, I need to brush up before I go any deeper. But this analogy backs up my fore-reasoning of what I considered to be the fundamentals of human conciousness and the structure of the society and surroundings that we have created and are accustomed to in our everyday lives. A thought is, in itself, a reality, whether is be a daydream or a hallucination, or the thoughts of a visionary engineer, the fact that it has been perceived by the human brain (which is complicated beyond our understanding) makes it actual.
