Tlahtolli: La flor de la palabra: abril 2011

23 abril 2011

Why do you want an iPhone if you have nothing interesting to say?

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive out; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; to communicate. Either it is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, for when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has a whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; is not an evangelist, nor he doesn't come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

- Henry David Thoreau
from Walden

Many talk the talk, but not everyone walks the walk

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, or even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

- Henry David Thoreau
from Walden

Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns

Confucius said, “to know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

–Henry David Thoreau
from Walden

The State is a bully

[...] Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced, I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me to obey a higher law than I. They forced me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceived that, when an acorn and the chestnut fall side-by-side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best as they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If applied cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

- Henry David Thoreau
from Civil Disobedience

You can imprison a man, but you can't imprison his mind

I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, unlisted considering the walls of solid stone, two or 3 feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and every compliment there was a blunder; for they felt that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditation, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

- Henry David Thoreau
from Civil Disobedience

Traveling is serious business

I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic. True and sincere traveling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any other part of the human journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it. I do not speak of those that travel sitting, the sedentary travelers whose legs hang dangling the, mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of setting hens we mean those that sit standing, but I mean those to whom traveling is life for the legs. The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him. You shall experience at last the old thread of his mother fulfilled, that he shall be skinned alive. His sore shoulder gradually deepened themselves that they may heal inwardly, while he gives no rest to the sole of his foot, and at night weariness must be his pillow, that so he may acquire experience against his rainy days.

- Henry David Thoreau
from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

The frontiers are in your mind

The frontiers are not East or West, North or South, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, further still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.

- Henry David Thoreau
from A Week on the Concorde and Merrimack Rivers

09 abril 2011

The sun doesn't care.

Plants thrive and vibrate and are filled with life then the light shines through their leaves, and the trees grow and reach to the sky like fans at a concert want to be touched by their favorite star.

And that's good and all, but sometimes it's cloudy and it's not the sun's fault because the sun is a giant ball of gas 63 million miles away, 8 minutes into the past. As a god, the sun is a powerful, albeit indifferent to our prayers and blessings, pleas and supplications.

Trigo

He started by feeding the sparrows who kept him company on his lunch breaks. They were sympathetic little creatures, but were high-strung by city life. He fed them his leftovers, and the birds loved him because he preferred couscous and quinoa. And little by little he trained them to eat from his hand, to not fight over food, to eat while flying or perched his shoulder. The sparrows learned that they were special and favored over the all other birds.

The training would occur only when no pigeons were in sight. When the larger birds appeared, rather than attack the sparrows would fly en masse to another food source as a means of distraction. A few sparrows would remain and eat from the man's fingers so at least a few of their kind would eat.

It was a matter of time until the man commanded a small army of sparrows who would do his bidding. Most of the time, they kept each other company, but once in a while, he would dispatch them to surround and bother pretty girls. He was satisfied with his lordship over the sparrows and they his command, because this made them superior to the pigeons, which everyone knows are really just rats with wings.