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Anthony Alvarado

Anthony Alvarado

Monthly Archives: December 2012

2012 in review – blogging

30 Sunday Dec 2012

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,100 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

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3 days until the end of the world

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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I was thinking about what my personal top ten books of 2012 would be. These are not books that came out in 2012, but my faves that I read this year. Here goes ( in no order) :

1. The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss

2. Catching the big Fish: Meditation and Creativity. Lynch

3. Wolf Hall, Mantel

4. Rings of Saturn, Sebald

5. A distant mirror, Barbara Tuchman

6.A High Wind in Jamaica

7. How Fiction Works, James Wood

8. Game of Thrones

9. Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

10. Best Recipes in the World, by Marc Bittman

OK. Decent list. If there is anything on here you aren’t familiar with you could do worse than to check it out from the library. But then I figured — alright imagine the world is ending in 3 days. What are your top 10 books of all time?

I know that Anna Karenina would be in there. But beyond that it gets very difficult. Not for  lack of potential winners, but because there are just to many to choose and ten is not enough. Does Dostoevsky push Gargantua off the list? Is there room for Catcher in the Rye and the Bible and the Upanishads? and and and? What about Hemingway, Salinger, Woolfe, Kafka, Gormenghast, Infinite Jest, Proust, Cormac Mccarthy, Rumi, Rilke, Plato? And oh yeah Shakespeare. Many of these authors have 2 or 3 contenders each for the list. Ulysses was great, but does it deserve to knock my childhood favorite the Hobbit off the list?

It’s an impossible list to make. I’m glad the world will continue, humanity is too hard to understand all at once, we need manageable portions like years, months and weeks.

Maybe next year I can finally finish Moby Dick?

Moby-Dick-3

1 week

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by Alvarado in Uncategorized

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Tags

connecticut shooting, Dostoevsky, end of the world, responsibility, tragedy

By now you have heard about the awful, tragedy in Connecticut. A shooter killed 27, 18 of them children. This is just a few days after someone in my hometown of Portland shot up a mall.

It’s sickening. The first reaction most of us have upon hearing of news like this, after the initial emotions of sadness, revulsion, etc. is why? What is the explanation of this? Humans seek to understand tragedy because we think if we can understand something we can control it. And so prevent it.

One of the first reactions I saw to this was on Facebook. Someone posted in response to news of the shootings – This is what happens when people try to interpret the Mayan calendar.

Now as I’ve said before I think the Mayan calendar has 0 influence on the length of the world, we will still be around in 2013, and 2014, and on and on. But I think this person’s assumption is very interesting: the assumption is that if people know that the world is going to end, they are like — well fuck it, I’m going on a shooting spree. Ladies and Gentleman, if that is all that really holds civilization back from murder and violence than it would be a good thing if the world did just plain end in a week.

Because the end of the world would mean that we don’t have to face what’s wrong with the world. And by the world I mean us, humans, people. (The earth, plants and animals would be doing just dandy without us). The end of the world is a fantasy that lets us ignore the real issues at hand, and the hard work that must be done if we as a race are to progress.

Now, where does that leave us, with regards to the old big question of the nature of evil? Why? How could this sort of thing happen? Who is ultimately responsible? I don’t know. The media will blame it all on the sick fuck that did it. (And I do think that the media perpetuates the cycle of violence as much as anybody, by obsessing over it — and by the media I mean us the readers.)

But, I think that we as a race are no longer children, we have powers, and access to technologies, ideas, and abilities that would have made us gods in the eyes of our ancestors. Maybe our moral reasoning, our ethics, and ideas of responsibility need to evolve and mature too. So here is a radical idea (despite being over 130 years old). What if we all take responsibility for all of society, as individuals, and we all take responsibility for all individuals as a society? Here is a passage from The Brother’s Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, where the elder monk Zosima explains this radical idea to his monks.

“When he knows that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for all human sins, the world’s and each person’s, only then will the goal of our unity be acheived. For you must know my dear ones, that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and each person on this earth. This knowledge is the crown of the monk’s path, and of every man’s path on earth. For monks are not a different sort of men, but only as all men on earth ought also to be. Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, and know no satiety. Then each of us will be able to gain the whole world by love and wash away the world’s sins with his tears . . .”

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So the world ends in 14 days . . .

07 Friday Dec 2012

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So the world ends in 17 days . . .

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Just imagine that the end of the world on December 21st is a certain fact, as sure as the sun sets. Now what? How do you approach the next two and half weeks?

Ask yourself if you would change everything, drop your normal routines and do everything completely different than the way you are already living your life? Or would you want the next few weeks to be similar to how you are already living?

If the answer is you would make a lot of changes then what is keeping you from living that life right now? The first realization most people have if they think the world is about to end is that they better get started doing all the things they always meant to do, but never found the time for. But what’s keeping you? The truth is — and this goes for everything, if you don’t get started chasing your dreams today . . . you’re probably not going to get started tomorrow. It’s always now or never!

It’s similar to Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal reccurrence.

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Nietzsche beleived you should imagine that you should imagine: what if I was fated to repeat my entire life, again and again for eternity. Then ask yourself if that idea fills you with dread or joy. If dread then maybe you should change how you live.

It’s easy to take life for granted. But these thought experiments can be a wake up call to the fact that : this is it.

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