Job 28:1

Saw a film about pointless evil this weekend. Was asked why I laughed. Couldn’t say.

“The gods justified human life by living it themselves--the only satifactory theodicy ever invented.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.”
-Ecclesiastes 9:9

“Does this not bring to mind the story of Death in Teheran? A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him the fastest horse so that he could reach Teheran that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, ‘Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?’ ‘I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,’ said Death.”
-Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

“What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: 'This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!' - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’”
-Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“I have just returned form a party of which I was the life and soul, wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired--but I went away--and the dash should be as long as the earth’s orbit---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------and I wanted to shoot myself.”
-Soren Kierkegaard, Journals

“When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love, together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been “wonderful”! To me this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance.”
-Norman Malcom, speaking of his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein.

“Wittgenstein had parceled up propositions into those which can be said and those about which we must remain silent. Scientific propositions fell into the former category, ethical propositions into the latter. But what many in the {Vienna} Circle misunderstood was that Wittgenstein did not believe that the unsayable should be condemned as nonsense. On the contrary, the things we could not talk about were those that really mattered. Wittgenstein had spelt out the point of the Tractatus in a letter to a prominent avant-garde editor: ‘The book’s point is an ethical one…My work consists in two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’”
-Wittgenstein’s Poker

“Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors--be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners’ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?

We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of an heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting other, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”
-Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
-James 1:27

I’ve seen live salmon twice. The first, they were being hauled up by a fishing net in a gasping, writhing mass. The second, they were making the journey back downstream after spawning--a journey they never complete. The adult salmon begins to die the second it reaches freshwater. Their bodies undergo an irreversible change as they enter the waters that birthed them. Their color slowly shifts from vibrant red or silver to a pasty gray.

When I saw the salmon up close it was a late summer day, the stream coursing lively alongside the newly-constructed observation bridge. All I could smell was the fresh-hewn cedar of the bridge and the mist from the newly-converted snow in the streambed. Being a southerner, I’d never seen salmon before. They came floating downstream towards a sea most of them would never reach. Those listless, spawned-out salmon are called kelts. They move slowly from eddy to eddy, waiting for a bear to swipe them or the current to send them careening. The ocean was only a few miles a way, I could practically smell it. And yet.

I remember watching PBS programs about salmon as a kid, seeing them launch themselves over waterfalls and thrash upstream in flashes of vivid, defiant color. It seemed almost a miracle.