Sunday, September 24, 2006 Suscribe to this blog


Arti Kebahagiaan sanny @ 4:24 AM


Bought a few books on Friday (intended to purchase something else but ended up buying others):

= Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl (very thick book...will put it off first)
= One Piece vol. 43 (I like the inspiring words on the cover wrapband!)
= Like the Flowing River, Paulo Coelho (short story collection...I like what he wrote about how he came about to be a writer and all the research he did to show his mom...it's all so true Btw, I just found out that 'Coelho' means rabbit!)
= The Interpretation of Murder, Jed Rubenfeld (I like reading crime novels...this one looks interesting as it's very much like The Dante Club, i.e. actual historical characters weaved into the story, in this case, Sigmund Freud)

An excerpt from the first chapter of The Interpretation of Murder which set me thinking. I think it's really quite illuminating:
"There is no mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them."

Isn't it so? I think, for a (somewhat) 'future' person like me, then I guess meaning it is. Which explains my bouts of mood swings and all the PMS. But then again, I yearn for a meaningful, happy present reality that I live in; because at the end of it, we are always in the present.

Haizz...nature is quite testing, doesn't it? Knowing human beings as such (i.e. capricious + dissatisfied), we are made to 'compromise' one thing in place of another. And the thing about compromising is that we hardly ever know how best to do so, if it even reaches a point of compromise that we're willing to justify.

By the logic above, that leaves us with a lot of unhappy, meaningless lives. The flip side is that reality's more than what a writer or philosopher can deduce; so there may be hope after all Wizard Howl