Characters:

X-- Mr. Perfect
Y-- Miss Philosopher, Not-so-Perfect

Part 1:

X: Will you marry me?
Y: No, i am sorry. I cannot do that.
X: Why not! What is wrong with me! Don't you love me?
Y: You have only one fault, and that is that you have no fault at all. Your perfection is your only imperfection. You are so perfect, you make me feel sick and irritated. I can't possibly love a person who has no flaws in character whatsoever.

Part 2:

X: Ok. Fine. Then tell me how to become imperfect! I'll develop whatever flaws you want me to develop in me!
Y: It doesn't work that way. People don't love in this fashion. Your perfection has rendered you incapable of appreciating such every day psychology.
X: So, it means there is nothing i can do?
Y: Yes, no one can help you in this regard. Imperfection cannot be taught.

Part 3:

X: Hey, hey, wait a sec!
Y: What is it?
X: I do have an imperfection! I have finally discovered one! My love for you? Is that not an imperfection on my part? I am loving an imperfect person like you... that is an imperfection!
Y: I must admit that you have come up a logical paradox. But i must do as the philosophers do.
X: And what do philosophers do in case of paradoxes?
Y: They ignore them. :P Good bye.

All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Helen Keller

Including all the people that we love, or have loved...

A good poem is capable of expressing a lot more than the poet had intended. A bad poem, on the other hand, is not even capable of conveying what the poet had in mind.

The song 'Laree Chooti' is the rage these days, and the charm of the song lies in it's catchy tune and it's reflective lyrics... making it a treat not just for an average teenager, but also to a thoughtful mind, because of it's philosophical implications. Here i'll mention some of them which i felt... obviously, this is an instance of 'creative interpretation', arising from the interaction of the song and my subjectivity, and does not in any way claim objectivity of analysis.

Kya huwa jo laree chooti
Jeevan ki gaadi luuti
Khwab hai to mujhko na jaga
Zindagi ek pal mein saali
Yun palat gayi hamaari
Jhuth hai to mujhko na bata

Translation:
[I translated it as i felt appropriate.]

So what if i missed the bus?
Or if the train of my life is robbed?
If i am living a dream, do not wake me up
It took just a moment…
For my damned life to become topsy-turvy
If this is a lie, don't bother to tell me

The most obvious thing is, of course, the attitude of indifference to the apparent loses of life... the song sees life as unpredictable and transitory... there is also mention of fate in the next stanza... if this life is to last for a finite period, and the end result is annihilation for all of us, then what do these loses matter?

I also see this song as one of the responses to the existential dilemmas... the question of authenticity and inauthenticity raised by Heidegger and of 'bad faith' (self-deception) raised by Sartre. Authenticity and Inauthenticity are two modes of Dasein ('Being there'). Authenticity represents the choice of self, when you yourself decide what you want to be. Inauthenticity is its opposite, when you let others define who you are or when you work to fit in the definitions prepared by other people.
'Bad faith' involves not being true to oneself and attempting to elude responsibilty by making different excuses. For example, a person may believe in an unalterable fate decreed by an omnipotent God and that his life is already determined. This is an attempt to escape from the sense of responsibilty. Sartre calls it 'bad faith' or 'self-deception'.

This song, however, boldly confronts these philosophers, and says, "So what if i am deceiving myself? So what if i am living an inauthentic life? So what if i am guilty of self-deception? If i am living a happy and satisfied life in the state of 'bad faith', what does it matters to you? If i am living my life as a dream, then let it be, let me live in this dream... i do not want a reality which will only bring me anguish, despair and nausea! If my life is a lie, it makes no difference to me!"

I don't think this is a response which Sartre can morally condemn... an existentialist may disapprove of it, but he cannot show this attitude to be ethically wrong... this is one of the biggest limitations of existentialism... it cannot prove the superiority of an enlightened life to an ignorant one. Sartre indicated in his philosophical masterpiece 'Being and Nothingness' that he will write a book on existential ethics, but he never did... perhaps because existential ethics is not possible at all.

And it is precisely this aspect of the song which makes it enjoyable for me. :)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

* "A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push." [Attributed]

Happy birthday to the great genius who showed us the possibility of pulling the door open!

* "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." [Saad, this is especially for your consideration.] [Attributed]

* "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) " [Philosophical Inverstigations]

* "To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." [Notes from 1916]

* "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." [Tractatus]

Nothing is better than the unintended humor of reality.
Steve Allen

Nothing is also more striking than the unintended meaning of reality... random, chaotic collisions of events producing a sensible, meaningful result, as if it were all a part of some predetermined plot.

"If religion presents itself now [at the age of puberty] as theological dogma it may rouse the youthful passion for debate, and suffer dismemberment; if it presents itself as the pursuit of the good it touches the idealism of the changing soul, and becomes an ineradicable part of the personality."

Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy

This surely reveals the brilliant insight of Will Durant regarding such matters. The religious opinions of a person depend a great degree on to what kind of religion he/she has been exposed to in youth. If his experience of religion is dark, dismal, suffocating... as a doctrine which imposes chains on human activity and limits human freedom... as a dogma which prevents mental and psychological libration, then chances are that the person will rebel against such a notion. On the other hand, if the version of religion the person is exposed to in youth is gentle, mild, liberal... as more of a moral advice than unquestionable rules... as a way of spreading kindness and good in the world, then surely the person would retain a strong religious element in his personality.

The tricky part is that most religions contain both elements... every religion has aspects which are hostile and suffocating... and every religion has components which promote kindness and good will.

"You know, it's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness... There is even a moment, right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

She doesn't love me
Oh my Lord
It doesn't mean it's a tragedy, tragedy
She doesn't mean it
Say that she don't
This doesn't have to be a tragedy, tragedy
Oh, no
This doesn't have to be a tragedy

All of my life
I was searching for the love that we had
Without knowing why
You turned around and treat me so bad

But oh, no
I'll just hold my tears inside
Oh, no
Maybe you'll find another lover who will cry

On the phone for hours
But we had very little conversation
We spoke of words with no meaning
We spoke of love with no end
I tell myself again

She doesn't love me
Oh my Lord
It doesn't mean it's a tragedy, tragedy

[Mark Antony]

To say that 'life is absurd and senseless' sometimes makes life more 'sensible' to me than the statement's antithesis.

“Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,” is the statement carved on the gravestone of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg. Happy birthday to the one of the greatest philosophical minds of all time.

Hi M. Awais Aftab!

Only few people know the art of conveying their true feelings into words through poetry. And believe me, you are one of them. I really like your poetry. Your poems are simply mind blowing. Keep it up and continue composing such poems.

Asma

20 April 07 Us magazine

What we can't say seriously, we say in humour.

And what we can't say in humour, we say it seriously?

I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.
Emo Philips

"The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned."
W. Somerset Maugham

Sigh.

"When i was small, my Aunt Bigeois used to tell me: 'If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you'll see a monkey there.' I must have looked at myself even longer than that: what i can see is far below the monkey, on the edge of the vegetable world, at the polyp level... I push my face forward until it touches the mirror. The eyes, the nose, the mouth disappear: nothing human is left.
...
Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a solitary? People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?"

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Happy Birthday to Anatole France!

* The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

* A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

* Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.

* If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.

* Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

* What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

"A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.
Edward R. Murrow

"He did it this morning...
he gives me that look.
What look?
To say...
your life is trivial.
You...are so...trivial.
Just daily stuff, you know, schedules and parties, and...
details - that's what he means.
That is what he's saying.
...
When I am with him, I feel
Yes, I am living...
and when I am not with him,
yes, everything does seem sort of...
silly."

From the movie 'The Hours'

"A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him but you can see his incomprehensible dumb-show: you wonder why he is alive."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"... and all he knew was that seeing her made him want to reach out and touch her, like a rare butterfly, just to see if he could do it, and if she would survive it. But like most rare butterflies, he suspected that if he touched her, her wings would turn to powder."

Five Days in Paris, Danielle Steel

"The women in his paintings-- he traps them in his world. You can get lost there."

A line from the historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, referring to the artist Vermeer.

The Passing Cloud

By Muhammad Awais Aftab

O! The passing cloud!
Tell me
Have you brought my beloved's love note?
Is your dark, gloomy colour
The colour of her thoughts?
These drops you sprinkle on me
Are they the tears from her eyes?
These circulating birds you escort
Do they echo the songs she sings for me?
The cool hasty wind brushing my face
Are they the kisses she has sent for me?
Torment me not, O Cloud!
I can feel her presence in you
The way you touch the strings of my heart
Evoking a music, so sweet and sad
Has not my lover taught you this?
And yet again
You remind me of my beloved's lips
Smiling, stunning but silent
Speak not, if you so wish
But drench me then -
Drench me in your rain
Drench me in my lover's tears!

Published in Us Magazine today.
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/apr2007-weekly/us-13-04-2007/p24.htm#1

"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

That is perhaps why it is usually the genius who suffers; the talented one goes on in this world successfully. And the genius is not even given the chance to choose; his destiny is written and sealed. Talent gains glory in life; genius earns glory in death.

Once a celestial deva came to Buddha in the shape of a Brahman enlightened and wearing clothing as white as snow. And he asked Buddha many questions, to which Buddha gave his replies. One of these series of question was:

The deva asked,

What is attraction?
What is repulsion?
What is the most horrible pain?
What is the greatest enjoyment?

The Buddha replied,

Attraction is wholeness;
repulsion is unwholesomeness;
The most tormenting pain is bad conscience;
The height of bliss is redeemed awakening.

"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Jacques Derrida

Does this also hold for self-referential propositions; that is, can one say 'I am a monster' [any eye colour would do!] without turning oneself into a pet?
God, these postmodernists really are baffling!

"Show me a thoroughly satisfied man-- and i will show you a failure."

Thomas Alva Edison

But what does that failure matter if that person is satisfied? What would a success matter if you are unhappy?

"A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

My dilemma. I have stared in the very eyes of absurdity, and now i am it's eternal captive :(

"To-Do" Saying-- Author

"To do is to be." Socrates
"To be is to do." Jean-Paul Sartre, Plato
"To be or not to be." William Shakespeare's Hamlet
"Do-be-do-be-do." Frank Sinatra
"Do be a Do Bee, don't be a Don't Bee." Miss Connie from Romper Room
"Scooby Dooby Doo." Scooby Doo
"Yabba Dabba Doo." Fred Flintstone
"Inka Dinka Doo." Jimmy Durante


Taken from
http://www.i18nguy.com/humor/doing-being.html

This painting is known as The Scream, or The Scream of Nature. In a note in his diary, the painter Edvard Munch described his inspiration for this painting, thus:

"I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

Kierkegaard, the father of Existentialism, wrote about his love for Regine Olsen in his journal:

"Thou sovereign of my heart treasured in the deepest fastness of my chest, in the fullness of my thought, there ... unknown divinity! Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ... it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here."

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals (2 February 1839)

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Mr Nietzsche, you have hit the nail right on the head! :)

I had my first chat with Faiza today! :D It was quite pleasant, and i really enjoyed it. One thing surprised me though. Faiza said that she had met my sister, and this reminded of one of my early chats with Anum in which she had described a similar event of meeting my sister. The spectres of the past. :)
Over all, i think Faiza is much better than Faria in almost every aspect. To what extent will i be able to trust Faiza, only time will tell. Let's hope for the best at the moment.
Ah, the euphoria! :)

This is a short dialogue extracted from a series of conversations between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, which Beauvoir conducted in 1974, and later published in 'Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre'

DE BEAUVOIR: Were you ever attracted by an ugly woman?
SARTRE: Truly and wholly ugly, no, never.
DE BEAUVOIR: It could even be said that all the women you were fond of were either distinctly pretty or at least very attractive and full of charm.
SARTRE: Yes, in our relations I liked a woman to be pretty because it was a way of developing my sensibility. These were irrational values—beauty, charm, and so on. Or rational, if you like, since you can provide an interpretation, a rational explanation. But when you love a person’s charm you love something that is irrational, even though ideas and concepts do explain charm at a more intense degree.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton

I think love also does a pretty good job in producing this result. :)

Love should not be reduced to a ritual, otherwise it would lose its charm. There should be a spontaneity in its expression, a newness, a creativity. This is what makes it exciting, this is what makes it enjoyable. Rituals force you to express your emotions in fixed ways, in rigid patterns... which, for me, is lethal to the spirit of romance.

"So if you want to love me
then darlin' don't refrain
Or I'll just end up walkin'
In the cold November rain"

Guns and Roses, November Rain

Song and lyrics that would never die! At least, not for me.

It is interesting to observe that the society encourages romance in stories, films, dramas, art and poetry. Such works get a lot of publicity and appreciation. But, in sheer contrast, romance is strongly discouraged in real life. A person is expected to show love in real life through the pale, lifeless institution of marriage, and any criticism is waved away by the stereotypical response that the love between husband and wife is the "true love". But how do these people remain ignorant of their own hypocrisies, because the type of love they appreciate in poetry and art is a radically different kind of love.
The explanation is perhaps that the infatuatuous, passionate love is a wild, untamed emotion. It's spontaneous and rebellious; it doesn't obey any rules. In other words, it is disruptive to the fabric of society. It breaks away the strands of social norms. And therefore, not surprisingly, the society discourages this kind of love.
But we all have the instinct for this infatuatous love inside us, which needs to be satisfied. And how does the society accomplish that? Through promoting precisely this kind of love in arts, films, dramas. An attempt to fulfull, to live through their suppressed fantasies. [Perhaps this explains the observation that girls are much more interested in romantic literature, while simultaneously being awfully and dreadfully unromantic in real life. The reason is perhaps that they are subjected to a greater degree of social suppression.]

"Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel."
William Hazlitt

Although i wouldn't say that this statement is universally applicable, but there does seem to be a grain of truth in it.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?

Jorge Luis Borges

Philosophy is the best consolation for love-ache. :)