“When you admit that life can be ruled by reason, the possibility for life is destroyed.”

Thus ends the first chapter of the brilliant second epilogue to Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace. What force pulls apart nations? Forges them together? What power moves a man to kill another man? The second epilogue is a very interesting essay on historical philosophy; but I think it also offers very interesting ideas that have nothing to do with power or government or war.

What force weaves two people together? What force tears them apart? What force brings them together again? Is it free will? Is it God? Is it some homogeneous combination of the two? Throughout the epilogue Tolstoy argues that the events of 1812 resulted not because of any great man or because of a special brilliance or genius, but because it simply had to happen. Not by one man’s will did men go to war and kill. Not by a brilliant tactitian or strategist was the war one, but by an innumerable series of events that had no resemblance to what was ordered by the generals.

Tolstoy talks all about the generals and the movements of armies, but for some reason he neglects to speak about all the threads of his story that had little to do with the army. The characters in his story could see into the future no more than we can. Their actions reflected what they believed would happen, and the things they did rarely managed to accomplish the goals they had in mind, but were in fact used toward ends which they could not comprehend at the time.

Events that seemingly destroyed their happiness at the moment turned out to be essential to ensuring their future happiness.

You can no more easily make someone love you than a general can make an army do such and such maneuver, winning such and such battle. When you examine it, when you wrestle with it, you realize that free will is the name history gives to irreducible causes. As Tolstoy says earlier in the epic:

” Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements”

You can’t just ask why or how Natasha ended up with Pierre, you have to ask why. They didn’t end up with each other because of Pierre, they didn’t end up with each other because of Natasha; I would be willing to say that if we were able to ask tolstoy why Natasha and Pierre ended up together, we would be told, “Because they had to”.

So the question becomes not “What force moves life forward?” but, “Where do we go from here? Where is God taking me now? How can I best align my actions and my feeble heart with the only will that matters, the will that moves history forward?”

I bought a mac. Thank you, thank you; hold your applause. I am a fairly competent diagnostician when it comes to windows/linux. I am no programmer by any means, and I know people who fly right over my head, but I knew enough to fix what needed fixing, usually. However, it was getting to the point where I was doing more fixin’ than usin’.  So I gave in and bought a mac because I felt like taking a break from worrying too much about the technical side of things.

Now I am not naive enough to believe that with the buying of a mac all of your worries go away, which is why I am constantly paranoid about how many programs I have open and how much hard drive space I have. I want to keep as many things as I can on external drives. I was adding music to my ipod when it happened; Catastrophic failure. My Ipod was deleted. I thought I had it sufficiently backed up my music to my hard drive. Little did I know that all the backup copies skipped because of  a faulty cord.

I lost a lot of music.

I had a very, very decent Jazz collection. I had countless hours of Classical music. Gone. Goodbye. Two year’s work, deleted in a single keystroke.

Fear not, even amongst the burning, smokey, corpse filled remains of my ipod, there is hope. I shall rebuild. I must rebuild. Already the downloads have begun. Slowly but surely Mingus, Brubeck, Baker, Coltrane, Davis, Armstrong and the rest return to me. It will take time, but I am sure that I will come out the other end with an even better collection.

Robert Gibbs has not had a good month. I lifted this transcript from Politico. Jack tapper and Gibbs get into it.

JT: Robert, two questions — one’s a housekeeping one. In the name of the transparency that you and the President herald so much, is there any way we could get the copies of the waivers that the OMB issues to allow certain Cabinet posts or deputy posts to be free of the ethics constraints you put up? And also the disclosure forms that your nominees put out that go to office of government ethics that somehow they are not able to email or put on the web, is there any way we can get copies of those?

RG: I will check. I don’t know how those forms are distributed.

JT: Based on listening to the president’s rhetoric, I’m sure this is something he would want to do.

RG: Well, knowing of your crystal clarity on his opinion, I’ll certainly check.

JT: He doesn’t believe in transparency?

RG: Did you have another more pertinent question?

JT: I think that’s fairly pertinent to your cabinet nominees and whether not they pay their taxes and whether not they have speaking fees with all sorts of industries you are supposed to regulate, I think that’s fairly pertinent, you don’t?

RG: Obviously, I do. And obviously the President does.

JT OK. A majority of the American people support blocking or making major changes to the stimulus bill, according to the Gallup poll. Are you worried you have lost the process of how the bill is received?

RG: Chuck?

Yikes

 These two words have captivated my mind as of late. Just the thought of being there. Not “being there”, but really thinking about what else I have to do today. Not “being there”, but worrying about what people think. Just truly being where you are. I heard somebody say recently that a human being is just that: A human (subject), being (verb). Not a “Human doing”, or a “human producing”.

I am beginning to take more and more joy at the pure visceral pleasure of life. The drowning quiet of the pre-dawn hours contrasted by the light bird songs of morning. The interesting patterns in the bottom of a tin pan. The taste of a bad cup of coffee. I find myself walking more and more places, riding my bike more and more places. As Ghandi said, “There is more to life than just trying to speed it up.”

Just thoughts.

Some people dislike Wes Anderson and the movies he makes. I am not one of those people so if you are particularly astute you might pick up on a slight bias. This movie is a beautiful experience that communicates a fairly simple message but not necessarily full of simple characters.

Things working for this movie:

• An Excellent soundtrack. (staple of a Wes Anderson movie)
• Vibrant visual world that sets the exact atmosphere Wes is going for.
• Details, Details, Details
• Great performances by Wilson, Brody, and Shwartzman
• The increasingly funny fact that there is almost nothing spiritual about their spiritual journey.

While not as funny as his previous films I think that The Darjeeling limited will hold up as just as good of a film as his best.

This is a video I made about life.

So apparently we have an eternal soul.

Great!

… What does this mean?

Would it even be possible for a soul to die? I suppose that depends on your definition of “soul”. Is a soul a soul in the sense of Descartes? Some floaty light thingy that interacts with our body through a specific point in our brain? Or are we merely biochemical processes forming what seems to be conciseness? Because those things, to my understanding could die. And a soul, by the biblical definition, is a thing that does not die.

Can the part of me that thinks die? Can the part of me that feels die?

Please don’t label me as a Neo-platonist, bear with me. What if the soul is the “form” of who we are. As in, it is the organization of materials or the recipe that brings about awareness.

So existence is like a cake. And the soul is like an index card that lists all the ingredients. I can take that index card with me anywhere and have the potential for a cake. You might say that the Descartian view would be saying that the cake itself is the soul and that the atheistic view would be that the eggs and flour and sugar would be the soul. But both of these things can be destroyed. But a recipe cannot be destroyed. As long as the rules that govern the universe that allow it to be so remain, then that recipe will always produce a cake.

Anyways these are just some things I have been thinking about. Any comments/ideas?

So if I write a book. This is what the title of my first magnus opus will be:

“Fiddledy Sticks!” Why Everything you know about epistemology is wrong!

And Ben and I, inspired primarily by the scene that can be viewed below, are working on a four volume epic: “The Gospel according to Goonies” 

Apparently Barnes and Nobles has this thing going on where you can buy an author’s best know or most critically acclaimed works in one volume for 12 bucks. So say for example, you could pick up Hemmingway’s “A farewell to arms”, “For whom the bell tolls”, “The sun also rises”, and “The old man and the sea”, in one volume, unabridged. Since my library doesn’t have an unabridged version of “War and Peace” I went ahead and bought the Tolstoy collection. I now have “War and Peace”, “The Cossacks” and “Anna Karenina”, for 14 bucks. A very decent deal in my estimation.