"Proverb" Steve Reich
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!
Text from Ludwig Wittgensteins Culture & Value.
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The years now go by so quickly, but it seems as if I have been in this moment my whole life, that life having begun and ended in the early spring of 1995. That life is now remote distant. Time has stolen it away bit by bit until now not even the pain remains. That life was all of me, and now I am nothing.
Still time plays on
I have tried for the last time to resurrect what I was in my life before that life of a moments death. I had one thing that made me better than the rest, and that was my intelligence. Now that is gone too, and that is the one thing I thought I could not lose, not in such a subtle way, not so that no one could see it if they werent looking for it and knew I once had more. Its still there, but the speed of it is gone. I feel all as if I was in a cloud.
There are the medications meant to tame my insanity. I was pretty much pickled not to many years ago, but now I am just on mood stabilizers, which should not cause that much of a problem. However, if I really want to be honest with myself, my intellectual difficulties began between undergrad and graduate school, about fifteen years ago. I can always say the difference lies in the schools, my undergraduate Alma Matter being quite inferior to the graduate program that I lucked into. Then again, I can also blame it on the considerable amount of drugs that I took in those two intervening years.
So I have to ask myself if there might be one other thing in my life that I regret besides that one moment in the spring of 1995. Do I regret those couple of years of recreational drug use? To answer this I have to review why I ever chose to take the drugs in the first place. That is simple because I had spent my entire life pursuing true love, I had found it, and I had been denied it. I needed something to replace the experience of love, and not just any other experience would do. The despair I felt in an acid trip almost equaled the despair I felt in love. The despair was almost so intense that I felt I was doing it for her, but not quite, and I couldnt have done it forever.
Then my wife came and gave me her love. It was not long before she was my only addiction, and she was my complete addiction. She breathed life into me who had never had life before. She was my life.
I know what I did, though I never state it plainly. I know why she left me. All the same, its like its something I read in a book. I have a complete affective detachment with the event, because I simply could not live with myself otherwise. Therefore, that moment will never be resolved in me, and that moment has become my life.
The question of whether I regret anything else is irrelevant.
So I wait. I wait for this life to fade away, for time to devour it all, every person, every place, every thing. When it is all gone, my memory of it all will certainly fail, and I will be free.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!
Text from Ludwig Wittgensteins Culture & Value.
---
The years now go by so quickly, but it seems as if I have been in this moment my whole life, that life having begun and ended in the early spring of 1995. That life is now remote distant. Time has stolen it away bit by bit until now not even the pain remains. That life was all of me, and now I am nothing.
Still time plays on
I have tried for the last time to resurrect what I was in my life before that life of a moments death. I had one thing that made me better than the rest, and that was my intelligence. Now that is gone too, and that is the one thing I thought I could not lose, not in such a subtle way, not so that no one could see it if they werent looking for it and knew I once had more. Its still there, but the speed of it is gone. I feel all as if I was in a cloud.
There are the medications meant to tame my insanity. I was pretty much pickled not to many years ago, but now I am just on mood stabilizers, which should not cause that much of a problem. However, if I really want to be honest with myself, my intellectual difficulties began between undergrad and graduate school, about fifteen years ago. I can always say the difference lies in the schools, my undergraduate Alma Matter being quite inferior to the graduate program that I lucked into. Then again, I can also blame it on the considerable amount of drugs that I took in those two intervening years.
So I have to ask myself if there might be one other thing in my life that I regret besides that one moment in the spring of 1995. Do I regret those couple of years of recreational drug use? To answer this I have to review why I ever chose to take the drugs in the first place. That is simple because I had spent my entire life pursuing true love, I had found it, and I had been denied it. I needed something to replace the experience of love, and not just any other experience would do. The despair I felt in an acid trip almost equaled the despair I felt in love. The despair was almost so intense that I felt I was doing it for her, but not quite, and I couldnt have done it forever.
Then my wife came and gave me her love. It was not long before she was my only addiction, and she was my complete addiction. She breathed life into me who had never had life before. She was my life.
I know what I did, though I never state it plainly. I know why she left me. All the same, its like its something I read in a book. I have a complete affective detachment with the event, because I simply could not live with myself otherwise. Therefore, that moment will never be resolved in me, and that moment has become my life.
The question of whether I regret anything else is irrelevant.
So I wait. I wait for this life to fade away, for time to devour it all, every person, every place, every thing. When it is all gone, my memory of it all will certainly fail, and I will be free.