The Effects of Health, Youth and Idleness

"I was restless, absent-minded, and dreamy; I wept and sighed and longed for pleasure which I could not imagine but of which I nevertheless felt the lack. This state is indescribable; and few men can even have any conception of it. For most of them have anticipated this overflowing of life, which is both delicious and tormenting, and which, in the intoxication of desire, gives one a foretaste of gratification. The heat in my blood incessantly filled my mind with pictures of women and girls. But not knowing the true nature of sex I imagined them acting according to my own strange fantasies, and had no idea of anything else. (90)" -Rousseau's Confessions

Inti : Inca Sun God

NATIONAL GEO has a great documentary Inca Mummies: Secrets of the Lost World over at hulu. The Inca carved their civilization out of the Andes Mountains which at its height reached over 1400 miles along the coast of the Pacific.

Part of the modern mind-set, shown in this documentary, has to do with rediscovering things which, through a brutal history, have been lost or killed off before gaining an intimate knowledge of what they were. Later on we come of find that the intrigue in viewing different ways in which people create their own realities through culture is much more fasinating than extinguishing that culture and replacing it with your own. Understanding is the rhetoric of compassion.

In modern day Peru the poor community of Tupac-Amaru lives among the ruins of an Inca civilization. Tupac Amaru was the last indigenous leader of the Inca Empire. I'm not sure if this community is built on the same ground in which the Inca took their final stand against the Spanish. In the community of Tupac-Amaru there are mummified Inca elite buried just below much of the shanty-city. Guirremo Kauc, excavation leader trying to save these pieces of history had this to say: "Archaeological excavation is reconstructing the past by pieces, like a puzzle. There are a million of pieces that we have to put together. With every bone with every mummy we find a living person comes back to life."

The Child is father of the Man

"Mine was no true childhood; I always felt and thought like a man. Only as I grew up did I become my true age, which I had not been at my birth. (67)" - Rousseau's Confessions

One Great Maxim

"[My reflections] have taught me one great maxim of morality, the only one perhaps which is of practical use: to avoid situations which place our duties in opposition to our interests, and shows us where one man's loss spells profit to us. For I am sure that, in such situations, however sincere and virtuous the motives we start with, sooner or later and unconsciously we weaken, and become wicked and unjust in practice, though still remaining good and just in our hearts. (62)" - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Camus' character Tarrou from "The Plague" speaks figuratively of the modern human condition

"That's why everyone in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death. (236)"

MANNA pt 1

As Manna awoke in his apartment he heard the lull of the wind outside and saw that he could see it running in the tops of leaves; and he heard the fountain in the pond discreetly and he saw it too, pumping water into the air. Having bad eyes his view is blurry. Still he knows the scene well enough. Many days and nights he's look out over the thicket bending at the whims of each season. Cause and effect seems little short of magic. And now spring had settled down as if for so long she'd been waiting. Was the world today up to its usual tricks? The darting blue finches skimming their feet on the water-surface. And what, was it to rain? The whole of this stolid acrid color looming. Perhaps it won't. And the sky'll just stare back. Blankly. It'll look at Manna through the window, his image sprawled on the bed and gazing out at her, and fall in love. He hears a world outside but cannot feel the sky trying to reach him through the window panes.