Mr. Bucket Quotes Michael Jackson

Mystery Solved

2 books, 1 controversy

We were positively encouraged to create for ourselves minds we would want to live with. I had teachers articulate that to me: ‘You have to live with your mind your whole life.’ You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with. Nobody has ever said anything more valuable to me.

Ferrari: As we have talked about faith or its absence, I want to mention something about our times that seems strange to me. Over the centuries, men in the Protestant and Catholic West have worried about the dilemma of the soul’s salvation. But it seems to me that recent generations do not think that it is even a dilemma. Borges: That seems pretty serious to me, that a person or people do not possess an ethical instinct or sense, doesn’t it? Moreover, there’s a tendency, or a habit, of judging an act by its consequences. Now that seems immoral to me, because when you act you know if your acts are evil or good. As for the consequences of an act—they ramify and multiply and perhaps balance out in the end. I do not know, for example, if the consequences of the discovery of America have been good or evil, because there are so many. Even as we are talking, they are growing and multiplying. Thus, to judge an act by its consequences is absurd. But people tend to do this. For example, a contest or a war is judged according to failure or success and not according to whether it’s ethically justified. As for the consequences, as I said, they multiply in such a way that, perhaps in time, they balance out and then become unbalanced again. It is a continuous process. Ferrari: With the loss of the ideas of salvation and damnation, there’s the loss of the ideas of good and evil, sin and virtue. That is, there’s a different version of things that excludes the earlier world view. Borges: People now only think about whether something is advantageous. They think as if the future doesn’t exist, or as if there is no future other than an immediate one. They act according to what counts in that moment. Ferrari: And that way of being, of being preoccupied with immediacy, has turned us into “immediate” beings, perhaps even into futile ones. Borges: I completely agree.

Borges: Well, language does not match up to the complexity of things. I think that the philosopher Whitehead talks of the paradox of the perfect dictionary, that is, the idea of supposing that all the words that a dictionary registers exhaust reality. Chesterton also wrote about this, saying that it is absurd to suppose that all the nuances of human consciousness, which are more vast than a jungle, can be contained in a mechanical system of grunts which would be, in this case, the words spoken by a stockbroker. That’s absurd and yet people talk of a perfect language, of a rich language, but in comparison to our consciousness language is very poor. I think that somewhere Stevenson says that what happens in ten minutes exceeds all Shakespeare’s vocabulary [laughs]. I believe it’s the same idea.