Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos
"Le Chtelard," Village of Saint-Sigismond, France
Everyone who thinks is unhappy, says Sergei Dovlatov in a single of his stories. Some crows caw all day, a little have nothing to say. you see a single of them pace behind as well as onward on my grass a approach Ive seen Hamlet do on stage. Whatever is bothering him seems insoluble, as well much for a single crow to figure out on his own. Still, no harm trying, you suppose, even with a pole his relatives have been creation as they fly to as well as fro, as if a highway they manage is not lonesome usually with fallen leaves as well as rags of ice, but also with uninformed highway kill.
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My late father, who had something good to contend about many things, used to console people who complained about bitter cold weather by reminding them of a joys of a hot play of soup as well as of a clever drink being made slight early in a day by a extraordinary circumstances. In addition, he claimed which a cold concentrates a mind. The moment you step outdoors, you do what you have to do with uncommon comprehension as well as dispatch, distinct those folks who can afford to sit in a shade on a little Mediterranean or Caribbean island. Once you distortion down, time ceases to count as well as you can discuss on eternity, Cioran believed. History, he said, is a product of people who stand up as well as get busy. Can a single be a dreamer or a fool on a North Pole? My father had his doubts about that. How does Berlioz sound during forty below? How does Schumann? He never cared to find out.
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If usually Plato as well as Socrates had to scratch a ice off their windshields as well as understanding with passed car batteries, you was starting to add, when a offensive realization struck me that, notwithstanding a perpetual New Hampshire winters as well as a presumably heightened state of int! elligenc e, weve never of late up here constructed a single philosopher which anyone would care to remember. So, this uncanny feeling which you have, when you get up in a center of a night as well as tiptoe on unclothed feet down to a cold kitchen to look during a thermometer outside, which Im on a verge of a supreme insight, something worthy of Blaise Pascal contemplating a silence of a infinite universe, turns out to be all hooey. Well, maybe not entirely: a a single whose thoughts is clear senses himself free, a master of his destiny. Who says truth is incompatible with tough labor of self-preservation? When Im shoveling snow off a roof tiles you sneak admiring glances during myself as if you were Nietzsches superman.
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Still, you cant assistance but feel which Im surrounded by deep thinkers: a young cow station puzzled in a field lonesome with first snow; a hybrid Ive been job Schopenhauer, sighing during a end of his heavy chain, or a alternative a single who reminds me of Karl Marx as well as who you saw bark during a military in their cruiser as they drove past his house. Even a lake about to solidify appears tongue-tied with indecision as well as lost in thought. As for cats, there contingency be during slightest a couple of Wittgensteins slinking around behind porches in a vicinity as well as a single large, long-haired black tabby who comes to rub himself opposite my leg right away as well as then as well as whom Ive declared after Boethius, who wrote Consolation of Philosophy, a single of a many renouned books in Medieval Europe.
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No philosopher has ever influenced a attitudes of even a travel he lived on, Voltaire was reputed to have said. Thats not what you believe. With deep winter on us as well as a weather flourishing colder, even a wood fume out of a neighbors chimneys could be described as philosophizing. you can see it pierce a lips as it rises, telling a indifferent sky about a loneliness, a torment of a minds as well as passions which you keep tip from a! ny other , as well as a wonder as well as pain of a mortality as well as of a contingent vanishing from this earth. Its a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet which precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement during a unclothed trees, a gray daylight creation a slow shelter across a unclothed fields, as well as inevitably recalls which Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of only such a winter afternoonwindless as well as cold, when an otherworldly light falls as well as shadows hold their breathand of a hurt which it gives us for which you can find no scar, usually a closer look inside ourselves where a meanings as well as all a unanswered questions are.
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