*

DEFINITIONS: PASSION
I wish I could think of a word to describe that meaning-
content that distinguishes a vital experience from the
ritual that constitutes about ninety per cent of living.
I suppose it's sheer vitality, since to the really
vital, everything is interesting.
[C.Wilson, Man Without a Shadow, p.39]
 
 

 
 

PHILOSOPHERS SONG
[ by Monty Python's Flying Circus ]

Immanual Kant was a real pissant
 Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy begger
 Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out consume Wilheim Friedrech Hegel.

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
 Who was just as sloshed as Shlegel.

There's nothing nature couldn't teach
 About the raising of the wrist.
 Socrates himself was permanently pissed!

John Stuart Hill of his own free will
 On a half bottle of Shaddy was particularly ill.

Plato they say could stick it away
 Half a pint of wiskey everyday.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
 Also fond of his gram.

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
 "I drink! therefore I am."

Yes Socrates himself is particularly missed
 A lovely little thinker; but a bugger when he's pissed!

 I sit here in this room and the problem seems at once immense and
non-existent. Life is a desert of freedom; but because it is a desert,
we are too free. It Is like being suspended in a total void, with no
gravity; because you can do anything, you do nothing, and every effort
to change your position costs immense energy because there's nothing to
brace yourself against; try to move your arm backwards, and your whole
body turns, leaving the arm in the same position. I sometimes used to
wonder how certain writers [and others] could spend their whole lives
in an unchanging state of despair or feebleness; now I know; they
imagine that the chance position into which freedom has flung them
is a law of the universe. [C.Wilson, 'Man Without a Shadow', p.79]