Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music – not too much, or the soul could not sustain it – from time to time.
-Michael Holme
Vikram Seth
What right have I to mock your love? Those rudimentary ideas you have of it. It is not like I have better answers to offer. And it seems to work for you. You are out with a girl and I am sitting at my desk in the office. Thinking and rethinking what it is that I haven’t figured out yet.
When you kissed her the other night on the dancefloor, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while. Alive. Jealous. Rightfully so. I mean she was supposed to be my girl. I called dibs. But tonight, with this girl I don’t even know, I have no cause to feel so.
It is just your theory against mine. Your idea against mine. That doesn’t say much. I needn’t feel inadequate.
I don’t.
May be I do.
But I know that I feel envy fill my veins like darkness at dusk. Slowly slowly.
The dark side beckons. May the force be with me.
A creature sprawled
middle of the road, cars going
zip zap zoom
crashed smashed squashed
McDonalds paper bag
Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
And to think that she wouldn’t exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.
—-Borges
“Why did I tell her? Did I foresee this? Was I even thinking?”, you ask.
Decision theory, they claimed, was a tool that would help me make my decisions.
In decisions under uncertainty, suppose that you have two possible actions, A1 and A2, and the worst outcome associated with A1 is at least as good as the best outcome associated with A2; suppose also that in at least one state of the world, A1′s outcome is strictly better than A2′s. Let us say in that case that A1 superdominates A2. Then rationality surely requires you to perform A1.
So how does this one go
She loves me She doesn’t
I profess my love Fairy tale Status quo
I hide my love Missed opportunity Status quo
Surely, rationality demanded that I tell her. Unless I was wrong about the outcomes. Or the probabilities weren’t 50-50.
So many uncertainties. Ah well! I flipped a coin. Heads I tell her. Tails I don’t.
It was Tails. I told her anyway.
One cannot say that “the truth” can overcome the lie and the error. O, you who say this, ask yourself: Do you dare to claim that human beings, in a crowd, are just as quick to reach for truth, which is not always palatable, as for untruth, which is always deliciously prepared, when in addition this must be combined with an admission that one has let oneself be deceived!
Somewhere in my head, I am peerless. I cannot digest that he is a better man than I am. In your eyes.
Sartre claims Hell is other people
Eliot, that Hell is oneself,
And others mere projections
What do I care?
I am in Hell.
And there is no escaping
Does he kiss you like I did? On your eyelids. Does he hug you from behind and rub his stubble on your shoulder till you double up laughing? Does he smell your hair and play with it while you are trying to read? Does he steal food from your plate? Does he give you a melted bar of chocolate that he has carried around in his trouser pockets all day?
Does he love you like I do?
Then, why?
