Masks

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-172074098?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

"All great things must first wear monstrous and terrifying masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." Nietzsche

"All they lacked was a past"

...British philosopher, Galen Strawson, who claimed to have no sense of himself as a continuously evolving being—a creature whose self consisted of a coherent story about accumulating memories and distinctive traits. Strawson was, for that reason, uninterested in his past. He acknowledged that his life had shaped him, but he believed that whether or not he consciously remembered it didn't matter to who he was now, any more than it mattered whether a musician playing a piece could call to mind a memory of each time he'd practiced: what mattered was how well he played. What was important, Strawson felt, was his life in the present. He liked to quote the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a British philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who had felt the same way:

The metaphysicians … affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. [But] what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If, whilst I am, I am but as I should be, what do I care more?

Nick wasn't sure he agreed with Strawson, and he certainly didn't feel, as Strawson did, that his memory of his own life was unimportant, but he found the argument somewhat comforting. He still longed to relive important moments in his life, but it was easier to think about this experience as just one of many he hadn't had, like paragliding, or visiting Peru, than as a void at the core of his self. Many people believed that their selves were made up largely of memories, and that the loss of those memories would be a self-ending catastrophe. But he knew now that there were also thousands of people like him, who had work and marriages and ideas and thwarted desires and good days and bad days and the rest of it. All they lacked was a past. ■

Just nov3 '25

"Ultimately, he thought, selves were not important"

Someone had told Isabel about a British moral philosopher, Derek Parfit, who had no imagery. He had few memories and little connection to his past, although he felt strong emotions about people and ideas in the present. Parfit believed that a self was not a unique, distinct thing but a collection of shifting memories and thoughts which intersected with the memories and thoughts of others. Ultimately, he thought, selves were not important. What mattered was the moral imperatives that drove everyone, or ought to—preventing suffering, the future welfare of humanity, the search for truth.

Information Overload, by Stephen Witt
New Yorker, Nov 3 '25

Why Are More Retirees Going Back to College?

Not my retirement dream, but I get why it might be for people who've not already spent a lifetime in academia.

At Arizona State University, residents pay about $500,000 in entrance fees to live on campus and take classes alongside undergraduates.
...For engaged residents like Mr. Weinreber, the teaching assistant, going to school forever — and learning just as much, if not more, from his mentees as he imparts — is a dream.
"I'm not going anywhere" Mr. Weinreber said as he headed off to check in with another student. "I just love it here."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/realestate/why-are-more-retirees-going-back-to-college.html?smid=em-share

"Have you tried taking long walks?"

Which Is Better, One Long Walk or Many Short Ones?

A new analysis is one of the first to study whether spacing steps out or consolidating them was linked to better health outcomes.

"...Those who regularly walked longer than 15 minutes were 80 percent less likely to die from any cause and nearly 70 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease over a roughly 10-year period, compared with those who got most of their steps in walks of five minutes or less..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/well/move/long-short-walks-health.html?smid=em-share

Kierkegaard on possibility

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Humani nihil alienum

 

https://humanists.uk/

"Life is after all a chain"

 

Never knew that's what Agnew's name meant

 

While I breathe, I hope 

The people’s house

FDR Memorial, Washington DC.

Trump Ballroom

"Prine radiates a sense of well-being..."

Just do it

Doomed (and yet, still laughing)

Shohei

Travel is broadening

More “magnificent desolation”

NASA releases clearest footage of Mars yet. 140 million miles away…

Avg temperature: minus-85 Fahrenheit. Go for it, Elon!

https://www.threads.com/@curiositydeepspace/post/DPwMVxYiQFx?xmt=AQF0xzpuMTEzJwieZG2fz2eqBF1zkEDdvD5K_WJA0oB6KA&slof=1

In our time

https://www.threads.com/@stephanpastis/post/DPxUXfECeK5?xmt=AQF0_PvxumMxRqmyJbJ4ts0bgPeNs7aLrhuey5RVpsjs7A&slof=1

Sorted

Writing holds water

The ❤️ of Dog

"It came to me that every time I lose a dog, they take a piece of my heart with them and every new dog who comes into my life gifts me with a piece of their heart. If I live long enough, all the components of my heart will be dog and I will become as generous and loving as they are". - Diane Keaton 🩶

https://www.threads.com/@janecataniastylist/post/DPsfms1k0NK?xmt=AQF0z1IlFvN81F7-m7Rn8idYWV0DIKzNOPib0uGO6VXxvg&slof=1

(also remembering what Annie Hall said about her Great Dane…)

Think like a dog?

"Dogs don't dwell on the past or stress about the future. They don't expect the worst, become filled with regret, or exaggerate the consequences of their actions. They live in the moment. Here's what happens when we think more like our canine friends."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist/202509/think-like-a-dog

For humans, though, some moments are capacious enough to include thought of past and future. They have their place, and their point.So have the moments of pure presence. Thinking the right thoughts at the right time (and knowing when to stop thinking): that's the challenge.

Accountancy

Adding It Up

by Philip Booth

My mind's eye opens before
the light gets up. I
lie awake in the small dark,
figuring payments, or how
to scrape paint; I count
rich women I didn't marry.
I measure bicycle miles
I pedaled last Thursday
to take off weight; I give some
passing thought to the point
that if I hadn't turned poet
I might well be some other
sort of accountant. Before
the sun reports its own weather
my mind is openly at it:
I chart my annual rainfall.
or how I'll plant seed if
I live to be fifty. I look up
words like "bilateral symmetry"
in my mind's dictionary; I consider
the bivalve mollusc, re-pick
last summer's mussels on Condon Point,
preview the next red tide, and
hold my breath: I listen hard
to how my heart valves are doing.
I try not to get going
too early: bladder permitting,
I mean to stay in bed until six;
I think in spirals, building
horizon pyramids, yielding to
no man's flag but my own.
I think of Saul Steinberg:
I play touch football on one leg,
I seesaw on the old cliff, trying 
to balance things out: job,
wife, children, myself.
My mind's eye opens before
my body is ready for its
first duty: cleaning up after
an old-maid Basset in heat.
That, too, I inventory:
the Puritan strain will out,
even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,
I'm Puritan to the bone, down to
the marrow and then some:
if I'm not sorry I worry,
if I can't worry I count.

"Adding It Up" by Philip Booth from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999. © Viking Penguin, 2000. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2008%252F10%252F08.html

A doze

Why is Snoopy smiling?

Don't worry

 

"Live long and prosper"-The continental drift of longevity research

...Diamandis's network, known to its constituents as the Peterverse, is largely peopled by slim, graying, well-off men who finger their Oura rings like horcruxes. America's richest now live a dozen years longer than its poorest, and they intend to widen their lead; Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner, and Sam Altman have all funded anti-aging research. Joel Huizenga, the C.E.O. of Egaceutical, a startup whose "water-based drink" aims to reverse cellular age, told me, "We don't work in mice. We work in billionaires."

Near the back of the Buck sat the biological theorist Aubrey de Grey, stroking a beard the size of a beagle. In 2004, de Grey coined the phrase "longevity escape velocity" to describe the moment when science stops us from getting older, so that, with further advances, we can begin growing younger. At the time, de Grey was viewed as a brilliant crackpot. He is now seen as a sort of Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift lacked only a practical understanding of how it might work... New Yorker, August '25

%s

Pearls before swine
https://www.threads.com/@stephanpastis/post/DPUM2THiUUE?xmt=AQF0eSpxmHgQkGntSJmWXRZXltwKblnmhjFS_ac8lqk3xg&slof=1

“Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation”

Or used to.

George Will, Ken Burns

https://www.threads.com/@kenburnspbs/post/DPTtiKTiEKX?xmt=AQF0zia1L2WYd3hYIi0U7RxDBdg8zx-HCZGouGunHeTuLw&slof=1