All of us together, rushing headlong towards our uncertain fate…
______
Judging from the way the world is going and the terrible things people are doing to each other, you really have to consider that the above title may be entirely one hundred percent accurate.
________
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal
_______
“…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor Frankl
MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING
________
“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”
Chuck Palahniuk
FIGHT CLUB
________
I’m on a see-food diet.
I see food and I eat it.
________
David Lynch’s
INLAND EMPIRE
and the cinematic suspension of disbelief: a film within a film within a film, many layers like a surrealist onion, open to countless interpretations and truly an artistic work of genius…
His films are like moving paintings, one atmospheric scene after another, always hinting at a deeper meaning; it’s there for you, but just out of reach, around the bend, hidden and blending into the unfathomable darkness. A subterranean labyrinth of sinister desires and dark psychological eccentricities, one never knows what lies in the next frame.
However, out of all of Lynch’s stream-of-consciousness, dream sequences that are often called films or movies, my favorite is still his true masterpiece,
MULHOLLAND DRIVE.
“SILENCIO,
SILENCIO
SILENCIO”
________
“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
Oscar Wilde
_______
“Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest.”
William Shakespeare
KING LEAR
_______
“I believe that all the questions and most of the answers in life can be found in Shakespeare.”
_______
“Emotions are just the play of light and shadow on the surface of the sea.”
D.T. Suzuki
Zen philosopher
_______
“Perhaps science and industry will unite the world, I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1946
_______
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written, consisting entirely of jokes.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
_______
“Memory can give warmth to time. And art can-when it goes well-give shape to that memory, even fix it in history.”
Haruki Murakami
_________
“In life, treat people nicely on your way up because you might see them again on your way down.”
_______
_______
“Philosophers and philologists should be concerned in the first place with poetic metaphysics; that is, the science that looks for proof not in the external world, but in the very modifications of the mind that meditates on it. Since the world of nations is made by men, it is inside their minds that its principles should be sought.”
Giambattista Vico
PRINCIPLES OF A NEW SCIENCE (1759)
“Why do we have a mind if not to get our way?”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Above 
quotes are from the Introduction to the classic 1978 work by a now famous Dutch architect and the following quote is the beginning of said Introduction and a few lines from later in the book…
“MANIFESTO
How to write a manifesto – on a form of urbanism for what remains of the 20th century – in an age disgusted with them? The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence.
Manhattan’s problem is the opposite: it is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto.
This book was conceived at the intersection of these two observations: it is a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.
Manhattan is the 20th century’s Rosetta Stone.
Not only are large parts of its surface occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the UN Building) and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall), but in addition, each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects, and popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the New York that exists.
Especially between 1890 and 1940 a new culture (the Machine Age?) selected Manhattan as laboratory: a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory of man-made experience, where the real and the natural ceased to exist.
This book is an interpretation of that Manhattan which gives its seemingly discontinuous – even irreconcilable – episodes a degree of consistency and coherence, an interpretation that intends to establish Manhattan as the product of an unknown formulated theory,
MANHATTANISM,
whose program- to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, to live INSIDE fantasy- was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated.”
“The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant.
It forces Manhattan’s builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid’s two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos. With its imposition, Manhattan is forever immunized against any further totalitarian intervention. In the single block – the largest possible area that can fall under architectural control – it develops a maximum unit of urbanistic Ego. Since there is no hope that larger parts of the island can ever be dominated by a single client or architect, each intention – each architectural ideology – has to be realized fully within the limitations of the block.
Since Manhattan is finite and the number of its blocks forever fixed, the city cannot grow in any conventional manner. Its planning, therefore can never describe a specific built configuration that is to remain static through the ages; it can only predict that whatever happens, it will have to happen somewhere within the 2028 blocks of the Grid.
It follows that one form of human occupancy can only be established at the expense of another. The city becomes a mosaic of episodes, each with its own particular lifespan, that contest each other through the medium of the Grid.”
Rem Koolhaas
DELIRIOUS NEW YORK
(A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan) 1978
________
________
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Benjamin Franklin
_______
“There are things in the world people are better off not knowing.”
Haruki Murakami
________
The past is gone forever and the future may never come, so the best we can do is live each and every moment as if it is both the first and the last time. To exist fully and wholeheartedly in the framework of each unit of your allotted time in this world, to be truly present in every millisecond, to exist purely as a grain of sand in the slipstream of time, well, there really isn’t anything more important than this, because what else is there? Seize the moment, seize the day, “carpe diem” and all that. It is honest, it is pure, it is our life…
THB3
_________
“All the world’s a stage.”
William Shakespeare
AS YOU LIKE IT
______
January 1st, 2023
As always, feels the same as last year to me.
YAY
(That is, until Chiharu and I had an awesome morning walk in the countryside of our new neighborhood and then I had an epic bike ride in the afternoon…NOW the year feels new…)
______
“The quieter you become the more you can hear.”
Ram Dass
______
“What is important is not creating something out of nothing. What you need to do is discover the right thing from what is already there.”
Haruki Murakami
KILLING COMMENDATORE
_________
Raindrops roll gently
down the petals of flowers
A sublime silence
THB3
It’s a haiku, don’t ya know?
________
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau
WALDEN
________
“TALES OF MOONLIGHT AND RAIN”
by Akinari Ueda
An 18th century Edo Period collection of stories…
What a title!
One of the tales is about the superstition that ghosts and restless spirits are lurking about on rainy, misty nights and mornings when the moon lingers in the sky, just like the reality of last night, this morning and tonight.
Let me tell you a little tale about my own mystical experience in the small Japanese town where I live, one rich in history. A place where the Samurai once roamed freely, way back in the time of the legendary shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa, when he ruled much of feudal Japan through his daimyo.
This town is a mysterious place, ghostly and silent. Its streets are quiet and empty by night, truthfully, sometimes even by day. There are many rustic old buildings and even some actual, genuine samurai houses that have been preserved very nicely. Its roads are winding and twisted, meandering everywhere throughout the bamboo forests that cover the hillsides.
I was walking through one such forest on a cool winter evening, the bamboo creaking and rustling in a light breeze. Tendrils of mist gathered in the forest, grasping at the darkness, occasional street lights in glowing haloes. I arrived at my home, which lies just beyond this haunting bamboo forest. I was sitting outside on my deck enjoying the mystical silence, thinking about these things when something caught my eye. I’ve always had good night vision so I was clearly able to see a rather large charcoal gray cat padding swiftly and softly through the foggy darkness. He was quite a ways down the empty street and the streetlights behind him were casting a long, wavering shadow on the asphalt coming towards me. Somehow, I just KNEW he was going to come my way. As predicted, indeed, he did make a sudden and deliberate left turn and crept ever closer, no streetlight now behind him, he moved in the shadows. I sat stone still in the darkness, awaiting his arrival. Didn’t move a muscle. Still, he sensed my presence and stopped abruptly not one meter away and looked right at me, ears perked up, listening. Was I a statue? Was I a ghost? He was alert, but not terrified-just surprised. His luminescent golden eyes caught mine for no less than 30 seconds and we exchanged secret unspoken messages, things seen and unseen, historical echoes, two things alive in this world reaching out to the long dead. I finally had to breathe again. I smiled and gently nodded and the cat moved on, heading west. He stopped again and looked back at me, then disappeared into the bamboo. At that moment, I heard a gong or bell from a nearby shrine rolling across the night hills. This was a significant moment, a connection, a gateway to another world. I live in the light but I’ve always been drawn to the darkness. Make of it what you will. I smiled again to myself and watched the glow of a half moon winking at me through the fog to the east. I fell back into the phantom pool of silence. Things will never be the same again…
THB3
January 14th, 2023
_________
“The best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect. This life will also be the happiest. Deep thinking is an activity that is appreciated for its own sake… nothing is gained from it, except the act of contemplation.”
Aristotle
ETHICS
4th century BCE
________
Did you ever consider the possibility that things just happen? I mean for no reason at all, no purpose, no deeper meaning, just a flow of random events occurring at irregular points in time. Chaos really, no rhyme or reason. No mystery here, no riddles to be solved. Maybe it just is what it is.
It’s kind of a disturbing thought, isn’t it? That it all might just be meaningless nonsense, this thing we call life. We can philosophize about it all we like, but when it comes down to it, this could mean that the only purpose in this life is to enjoy it to the best of our ability. To appreciate it for exactly what it is; a random chain of events interspersed with moments of pain and moments of great joy and gratitude. That, in itself, is the real mystery; how to make the most of our time…
THB3
________
“It seems as if, year after year, the world becomes a more difficult place to live.”
Haruki Murakami
________
Welcome to the dystopian future. Oh, you’re in it now.
It is an advertisement-saturated, personal data mining, clickbait-ridden, attention economy. They will steal your soul and sell it to the highest bidder if you let them.
Your 
= Their 
Ah, but there IS an escape hatch, if you’re willing. Ditch the fucking social media on your phone. Better yet, ditch it altogether. It’s a waste of life. Who the hell cares about people you knew in high school?! I don’t think we’re meant to know that many people anyway. If you want to talk to someone, just call them. Text if you must or email and arrange a meet. If they are far away, use FaceTime and have a good old-fashioned conversation. Speak! No goddamned posts or likes. Just real human interaction. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. This shit is unnatural.
All I use my phone for nowadays is calling my wife on my lunch break, talking to my Mom and reading books or listening to music. Yes, I read on my phone. I love the tangible feeling and the smell of a book as much as any reader, BUT…I also love carrying my huge library around in my pocket, accessible anywhere and anytime. It’s awesome. You’ve got to adapt to the times. No games, no gimmicks, no shiny colored lights or stupid Candy Crush-type games, just reading, one of my favorite things in life. Writing by voice dictation is a great way to create on the go too. Occasional photos…? Of course. Calendar planning. Reminders. Simple. Streamlined. Satisfied.
I feel free as a bird.
And you can too.
Unglue your eyeballs from that black mirror and take a walk outside. It’s beautiful. Be in the moment. And leave the damn phone at home if you can’t stop looking at it. It’s the only way to go back to actually living. Do it.
You’ll thank me later. More importantly, you’ll be happier with yourself.
THB3
January 21st, 2023
Japan
________
The Street Journals 