The Search for Meaning

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

What is life worth? Questioning the value of our existence has the utmost significance, but no response seems likely to fully satisfy our need for an answer.

More to the point, one man's questions pertaining to meaning and morality can result in many, many conflicting answers from others. And others might ask very different questions. It can reach the point where the argument shifts to which questions themselves are likely to result in the most relevant answers.

Do some here actually believe it is just a coincidence that thousands of years after mere mortals invented philosophy, we are still not even close to any answers that might be described as deontological.

Especially answers from those who insist both worth and value revolve solely around becoming one of them. And, further, that this is the only thing that will ever satisfy any truly rational man and woman.

First a few preliminaries. Our question could be raised out of despair by people who are struggling just to survive, in war-torn, enslaved, or environmentally collapsing countries.

Of course: that part:

The part that for literally tens of millions of men, women and children around the globe, finding answers that allow them merely to subsist [or not] from day to day is all that matters. And what are the lives of those in Gaza and Ukraine and all of the other "hot spots" struggling to survive from day to day worth.

Or, it could come from a position of privilege, being asked by those who have the luxury and leisure to ponder it. In addition, our question may not have arisen at all in early human history, or have ever been asked by those whose sociocultural experience is quite different from our own.

Here, of course, is where those like Marx and Engels introduced political economy into the mix. The part where human interactions eventually come to revolve around to the social, political and economic policies of those who have accumulated the most wealth and power. The government let's call it.

What is life worth to someone awash in riches derived from exploiting the wage slaves in one or another sweatshop around the world?

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly.” Alfred Russel Wallace

Mine in particular.

What does this beauty or this music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?' In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.” Helen Keller

Whatever that means when, say, you can see and hear?

“Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.” José Saramago

Like the alternatives aren't even worse.

“Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme." Terry Pratchett

Let's run this by Benjamin Button.

“The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.” Laura Miller

And here, he suspected, the more abstract the better.

“For the human experience, life in the natural world seems to require the application of meaning, in order to evoke purpose.” T.F. Hodge

Millions and millions of them so far.

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

Some reflections concerning life on Earth also make our question problematic. For most (perhaps all?) life-forms, the overriding purpose of existence is to reproduce the species, to be evolutionary self-replicating machines, serving as links within sustainable ecosystems. Yet one might well ask, ‘But what’s the value of all that?’

The human ant colony? On the other hand, human beings like ants like most other animals we are familiar with, do share one basic common denominator: subsistence.

All biological creatures one way or another have to survive from day to day. They have to acquire food, water and shelter. And, yes, they have to reproduce themselves over and over again.

It's just that for the vast majority of our fellow creatures, it's all done autonomically, instinctively, by the book. The book of nature.

But what happens when nature evolved into us? Again, assuming our own interactions are not entirely autonomic in turn, we are able to choose among many, many, many different social, political and economic agendas. And yet without some ultimate, intimate connection to God or the Universe, we are still smack dab in the middle of all this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies

So, given all of these One True Paths available to us, why one and not another? Why yours and not mine? Why ours and not theirs?

There isn’t any clear, uncontestable answer.

On the contrary, there are any number of objectivists able to assure any and all of us that only their own assessments asnd assumptions are not able to be contested. Or, if they are contested, watch out.

Or else, in other words.

Perhaps life, with all its dramas and developments, just came to be, and so just is, with no higher-order significance.

That's my own assumption. But I believe "in my head" "here and now" that my own set of assumptions, much like yours, are embedded metaphysically in The Gap and Rummy's Rule and morally and politically in dasein. Then the part where human interactions are the embodiment of the Benjamin Button Syndrome. The part where we go about the business of interacting with others given all the variables in our lives that are not either fully understood or controlled.

Moreover, when we examine the state of the globe, it may appear that the planet would be healthier minus certain species, our own among them, perhaps even at the top of the list. It might be better for the ecosphere, that is, for Homo sapiens – an apparently failing species bent on plundering the planet and its own self-destruction, consumed by animosity and fear directed at its own kind – not to exist at all.

Unless, perhaps, in a world awash in a new religion -- "show me the money!" -- existence is considerably more fulfilling for some than for others? After all, some plunder the Earth all the way to the bank. The amoral global capitalists revel in exploiting both nature and all the rest of us.

So, perhaps, in order to put the planet back on the right path only certain homo sapiens need be constrained.

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

While humans have transformed the Earth, there are few reasons to believe that we’ve made it better overall, or that other organisms have benefitted from our presence other than parasites and (some would claim) domesticated animals and other creatures that wouldn’t exist but for human choices and need-satisfactions.

Better for who? Certainly better for those who may soon be celebrating the DJIA at 50,000 points. Or the MAGA crowd. Or the global capitalists.

And it's true that while some deplore the fate of animals kept around only to sustain human consumption, if it weren't for human consumption how many of them would even be around at all?

Indeed, the conditions for the continuance on Earth of most life-forms (including our own) have become increasingly precarious precisely because of humanity. This is all unfortunately true, and it cannot be neutralized by citing the noble creative achievements of exemplary people or the love, friendship, and kindness with which many have treated their fellow humans and other creatures, laudatory though these all are.

Here, particularly, in two respects:

1] climate change that some predict will bring about global calamities of epic proportions
2] the ever-entrenched risk of a nuclear holocaust

We might well consider, then, whether we humans even have the right to ask about the value of existence without clearing up our mess first. Still, the question ‘What is the value of existence?’ keeps coming back at us with an urgency that cannot be denied or diverted.

Then those for whom the value of their own existence revolves almost entirely around "I've got mine, Jack!" Or the sociopaths. Or those who wallow in pop culture and/or in the pursuit mindless consumption, all the while praying to God that they will be selected for one or another "reality show".

[attofishpi]

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀God is rather avergage...in the mean_time..
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

Questioning the Question

Many would answer that the value of existence is inestimable, and would perhaps regard questioning that as peculiar, or as too silly to take seriously. They might say, life is good pretty much by definition, because ‘good’ implies life-enhancing or conducive to human flourishing.

Here I always come back around to all the things we do from day to day that bring us considerable satisfaction and fulfilment...no matter what we believe it all means. If anything at all. An essentially meaningless and purposeless existence is not likely to make the food we eat less delicious, or the music we love less exhilarating, or our accomplishments less pleasing.

Then, of course, back to this part:

Others probably never think about the question because (as noted earlier) they’re simply too busy managing to survive, or getting on with their lives as best they can, or actively enjoying life. But the question undeniably strikes others as intellectually intriguing and important.

And how is this not likely, in turn, to be rooted existentially in dasein? For any number of reasons, each of us here came to explore the world around us philosophically. Instead, my own point is to suggest that in regard to meaning and morality, it is the limitations of philosophy that most intrigue me.

For some, it may even give immediate voice to an anguished consideration of life or death, for existence may be evaluated anywhere between the extremes of being a total burden and a highly desirable good.

Then the part where each of us individually come to draw our own conclusions based either on circumstances or on the beliefs we sustain. And that includes all those able to believe in one or another religious dogma.

And let's not leave out the part where one person's highly desirable good comes about in a world where the consequences of that beget any number of burdens for others.

Whichever group one belongs to, querying the value of existence has weighty implications that ripple outwards to embrace a wide range of concerns, from the meaning of life to suicide, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, even animal rights.

And, in regard to any of them, what is the consensus philosophers have come to pertaining to behaviors that all rational men and women are obligated to choose?

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

Sigmund Freud oddly claims, in a letter to author and fellow psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte (13 August 1937), that to query the meaning or value of life is a sure sign of pathological disturbance – in spite of the fact that the state of the world then, as now (let alone the state of our own lives) might be thought to actually force the question upon us.

There are people who go about the business of living their lives without giving much thought at all to meaning and purpose. They are instead awash in pleasurable experiences that provide them with all manner of fulfillment. Often, it is only when for whatever reason that all begins to crumble, that they suddenly find themselves in need of, well, at least an explanation. Then cue all of the One True Paths out there they get to choose from that promise them exactly that.

In any event, more modern, enlightened, less claustrophobic thinking yields a different assessment – for example: “Experiencing an existential crisis does not automatically mean that a person has a mental health issue. In fact, it can be a very positive thing. Questioning one’s life and purpose is healthy. It can help provide direction and lead to better fulfilment in oneself” (‘Facing an existential crisis: What to know’, MedicalNewsToday, 2022).

Of course, there are existential crises as some construe them and existential crises as others construe them. My own revolve around being profoundly fractured and fragmented in an essentially meaningless and purposeless world that culminates in oblivion.

Some individuals entertain the idea that the world would be better off specifically if they themselves did not exist. But even if there unfortunately are people of whom this arguably is true – for example, sociopathic killers, tin pot dictators, international arms traders, and serial abusers – generally, the wish for self-extinction is more likely an indicator of conditions such as serious, intractable illness, chronic pain, or psychological disturbances such as clinical depression or intense feelings of unworthiness.

On the other hand, there are any number of sociopathic killers, tin pot dictators, international arms traders, and serial abusers who do not in the least think the world would be better off rid of them. On the contrary, their own narcissistic wants and needs are the only reason they need to instead use and abuse others.

Though who could deny that if you yourself had to endure "intractable illness, chronic pain, or psychological disturbances such as clinical depression or intense feelings of unworthiness" day in and day out, you are not likely to feel inclined yourself to be a pleasant person to be around.

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

Schopenhauer’s Value

Arthur Schopenhauer argues that life is dominated by suffering and negative outcomes, and is thus ‘a business whose returns are far from covering the cost’.

Of course, here we are immediately confronted with the existential reality that some lives are dominated by pain and negative outcomes considerably more so than others. Indeed, and any number of men and women around the globe wouldn't have it any other way. Their gain is often little more than a reflection of the pain it causes others.

The point he’s trying to make seems to be that on the whole, and for most people, life fails to produce sufficient rewards to offset the sorrows and suffering it brings. Pleasure and happiness are hard to come by; they lead to still more yearnings; and in any case are overshadowed by their opposites, displeasure and unhappiness.

Again, from my frame of mind, how each of us reacts to this individually will depend almost entirely "here and now" not on our "Philosophy of life" so much as the set of circumstances we find ourselves in. After all, as we all know, pleasure and happiness seem far more easily within reach of some rather than of others.

And what does this revolve around if not class, and race, and gender and all the other components of our "lived lives" whereby, depending on where we "fit in" as individuals given any particular community, we ourselves will have access to far more or for less opportunities than others. The part where philosophy meets political economy, stereotypes and any number of historical and cultural dogmas.

It's not for nothing that millions adhere to one or another religious faith in order to attain both a "spiritual" antidote and a "happy ending"...immortality and salvation.

Also...

Humans spend much of their time and resources despising and tormenting one another, and disease and death are everyone’s ultimate lot. Certainly adversity builds character; but this truth is insufficient to offset all the evils that beset us. So life fails the cost-benefit test of advantage to us.

Says who? It will almost always come down to that. In the other words, the existential parameters of your life may be nothing at all like the existential parameters of my life, or the lives of others here.

In fact, in my opinion, the role any number of philosophers here take is to obviate all that by insisting there is an antidote.

In fact, hundreds of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

Beyond these kinds of observations, Schopenhauer advances what he considers to be a proof that existence is worthless: If existence had any value in itself, he reasons, there would be no such thing as boredom: just being alive, doing nothing in particular – savouring the buzz of is-ness, as it were – would be experienced as a self-sufficient state to be in.

If that's what some call proof, then proof itself here basically revolves around just that...what some call it. While for others boredom is hardly ever experienced at all.

Me, for example.

On the other hand, what on Earth does it mean to speak of existence "in itself"? After all, even given No God and no essential basis for encompassing meaning in our lives, it hardly makes life worthless "in itself".

As he writes, “If life – the craving for which is the very essence of our being – were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing”.

This doesn't make much sense to me unless it's just his way of suggesting [as I do] that human existence itself is essentially meaningless and purposeless. But then given all of the existential options available to most of us, there are any number of experiences we can pursue to stave off boredom. And what exactly is encompassed here [for all practical purposes] in regard to "mere existence"?

Because people don’t perceive prolonged idleness in such a positive way, however, this demonstrates, he thinks, that merely existing is not in itself worthwhile.

All I can speculate here is that I must be missing the point. How ought one to perceive prolonged idleness? How prolonged is it? And what are the circumstances that precipitated it? Then those who would truly welcome a period of prolonged idleness in their life.

However, let’s say that an individual is totally immersed in contemplation of an artwork or in a mystical contemplation of nature. After a while, she inevitably becomes restless, time conscious, and…bored.

Yeah, she might. But for how long? Are there no other things in her life she can turn to in order to pique her interests?

Then [again] this part...

I think no one could rationally conclude from this that either aesthetic or mystical contemplation is a worthless state to be in. Hence boredom (however we may choose to analyze it) doesn’t look like a good candidate for undermining the value of existence. In any case, intrinsic value might admit of degrees, such that existence could have some value in itself without attaining the extreme degree some would wish to attribute to it.

This is all no less rooted existentially in dasein, in my view. For some, their lives are bursting at the seams with lots of worthwhile pursuits...while for others nothing seems worth while anymore. Or, given a new experience or a new relationship or access to new information and knowledge, it can all turn around.

That’s one possibility. But could existence be thought of instead as possessing instrumental or use value which redeems it, even if it lacks intrinsic value?

It seems obvious to me that this is the case. Your own life either has instrumental and use value or it doesn't. But how exactly would we go about pinning this down for others?

What's crucial for me is the extent to which others are able to convince themselves that beyond use value, their life is actually in sync with one or another One True Path.

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

The Value of Being Itself

G.W.F. Hegel argues that ‘being’ is the emptiest of concepts. When we examine the thought of being, he observes, we find its content to be as hollow as the thought of nothing. It follows, he continues, that being (or existence) is lacking in qualities that could express value, or, for that matter, any other concrete attribute.

Talk about a "general description philosophical contraption"!

Or will some here make an attempt to connect the dots between what they think this means and the manner in which it is thought to be manifested existentially in the lives that they actually live.

From my frame of mind, what makes philosophy particularly hollow is when it never really goes much further than this in exploring what it means "to be".

In other words, back to Will Durant's "epistemologists".

Thus...

Looking beyond this abstract point, the main problem with ascribing value to existence in itself – intrinsic value – is that we have literally nothing to contrast it with, from an experiential point of view.

No, in my view, the main problem here still revolves around the gap between what some will insist is in fact the intrinsic value of being itself and their failure to demonstrate how and why this is the case in regard to particular sets of social, political and economic circumstances.

It’s manifest that we never have been and never can be cognizant of total nonexistence, and could not in principle experience it, if indeed there is anything at all to be experienced about nothing.

All the more reason for paricular objectivists to insist that "if only others would think about being and nothingness as I do, they'd have access to 'somethingness' itself for all the rest of eternity."

Salvation some call it.

Then straight back up into the clouds...

If one believes that both before and after this mortal existence, nonexistence takes over, and all entities become nonentities, then there’s nothing to be experienced, since there will be no experiencing subject to have any type or degree of consciousness.

Uh, obviously?

As the eminent contemporary philosopher Ricky Gervais observed: “When people say, ‘What do you think it feels like after you die?’, I say ‘Well, what did it feel like for the fourteen billion years before you were born? It feels like that!’"

Well, at least that's settled.

No one was going, ‘Oh, I wish I existed. I can’t believe I don’t exist yet!’ (‘The Unbelievers Interview’). This humorous but pointed comment underlines the idea that nonexistence possesses no intrinsic quality.

All the more reason then for the objectivists among us to insist their own existence "here and now" comes about as close as mere mortals are ever likely to get to embodying an intrinsic meaning.

It's just that for millions and millions this isn't good enough. They need God or His spiritual equivalent in order to seal the deal on both sides of the grave.

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“Humans are born to die, anything in between is just pure nonsense.” Anupam S Shlok

You know, essentially.

“Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.” C.G. Jung

Our own meaning, for example.

“The ordinary man gets motivation from power and fame. The superior finds motivation in meaning and work itself.” Maxime Lagacé

Unless, of course, he's wrong.

“I think life is one big fluctuation between horniness and a sincere quest for meaning. We just call one the other.” Karl Kristian Flores

And then how that unfolds here, of course.

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and thats killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.” Bernard Shaw

Yeah, what about that?!

“Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.” Richard Powers

Mine? Pitch fucking black.

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

The Value of Becoming

Do you have to be a pessimist like Sophocles or Schopenhauer to seriously question whether existence (or life) has value? Surely not – no more than you have to be psychologically disturbed. But whatever answer one gives to the question, one might say that pondering the value of existence comes with the territory (of life), at least if the history of ideas provides any reliable evidence.

Whether in regard to the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the arts we pursue, the accomplishments we accumulate, the relatinships that fulfill us and on and on and on, there are countless things that give our existence value. And a pessimistic philosophy can often pale next to a brutaly pessimistic set of circumstances.

Existence may be said to be merely ‘what happens to be the case for a group of possible beings’. The Online Etymological Dictionary characterizes ‘exist’ as meaning ‘to stand forth, come out, emerge, appear, be visible, come to light, arise, be produced, turn into’ – a set of descriptions of becoming that the existentialists have gleefully seized upon in their writings.

Then the part where increasingly more and more of us prefer to exist...virtually? After all, online who we are is limited only by a lack of imagination. So, the value of becoming a different person can become such that it becomes preferable to "real life".

Yet in reference to living things specifically, existence certainly signifies dynamic potentiality, which is the capacity for something to develop itself or to become something else. Once obtained, existence or life can be found to be full of opportunity, or not. Potential can be actualized or left dormant. But if that’s the case, then the value of existence.

Yes, but the question then becomes this: full of opportunities to do what? the potential to accomplish or to achieve what? Then the part where historically, lots of different objectivists will be eager to tell you about the potential for opportunity. All you need do is to become "one of us".

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

The existence of any given entity is a sheer, remote, one might even say stunning cosmic coincidence, a pure fluke in the universal scheme of things.

And even here we have to insert this: click.

And, of course, psychologically, in being so utterly insignificant -- a speck of existence in the staggeringly vast context of all there is -- many "here and now" cling to moral, political and spiritual dogmas that provide them with the One True Path to Enlightenment and/or Salvation. And what has never changed [so far] is the fact that all one need do is to believe something is true, and that makes it true.

We can’t even meaningfully say what the odds are for any individual organism to be alive. But it doesn’t follow, without a lot of other considerations, that life is a gift, let alone a ‘most precious gift’.

Then straight back to a component of the human condition that enables millions to insist that, in fact, it really is just that.

A precious gift from God, for example.

First, for something to be a gift, there must of course be a giver; and except for the banal sense in which parents fulfill such a role in giving life, any other attribution is vexed and controversial.

On the contrary, right? There are Givers here up the wazoo. Deontologists, political ideologues, religious denominations, cults, nature fanatics, and on and on.

Religious positions remain disputed, including any religion’s reason why you or I or anyone else (or anything else) exists. In this sense our existence is a fact we cannot fathom, whether we appeal to an extra-worldly creator or not.

I agree. Only in regard to human interactions in the is/ought world, I am still inclined to be fractured and fragmented. Also, I've convinced myself further that in the absence of a God, the God, mere mortals are unable to establish deontological parameters pertaining to social, political and economic interactions.

Or, rather, none that I'm aware of.

[iambiguous]

The Search for Meaning
What Is Life Worth?
Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’.

Maybe there just isn’t a clear answer to the ‘value of existence’ question. Yet many would insist, ‘There must be a reason/purpose why I’m alive, and my task is to find out what it is and to fulfill it.’

On the contrary, we live in a world where hundreds and hundreds of millions are still convinced they have found the "clear answer" to the "existence question". And, in turn, they insist that their own One True Path is all that one need embrace in order to embody Enlightenment here and now and [for most of them] immortality and salvation there and then.

Again, just ask them.

Then the part where even given free will, all of these One True Paths are rooted existentially in dasein and not in any assessment that actually demonstrates there really is One True Path.

This again assumes a task-master who, like the gift-giver, is an agency lurking behind what’s given to our senses.

For example, the part where any number of folks here claim to have acquired an Intrinsic Self that allows them to "just know" intuitively, spiritually, naturally -- genetically? -- the right thing to do. And even though these Intrinsic Selves are often no less conflicted in regard to any number of moral and political conflagrations, no on is backing down. Why? Because they have far, far too much invested existentially in the Real Me astride the One True Path to back down.

The validity of belief or disbelief in such a being or power is an issue that’s not likely to be resolved. Therefore, a better place to put our mental energy is into reframing the question we’re presently trying to answer. Let us say, then, that existence is a means or a set of means, not an end in itself. If so, what is existence a means for?

Not sure? Then start here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

...or, by all means, add your own brand spanking new assessment of the human condition to the pile.

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“Things don’t have significance: they only have existence. Things are the only hidden meaning of things.” Alberto Caeiro

On the other hand, how insignificant is that?

“Find what is meaningful to you and stand by it. Even if you begin to wonder if there is any meaning to anything, continue to be yourself.” Jay Woodman

And if that is no longer an option?

“So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.” Iris Murdoch

Drip by drip by drip by drip by drip for some of us.

“Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.” Alberto Caeiro

Not much that doesn't include, I imagine.

“The music plays . . . and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.” David Mutti Clark

Maybe, but I'm sticking with this:

"If everything is a lie, is illusory, then music itself is a lie, but the superb lie. As long as you listen to it, you have the feeling that it is the whole universe, that everything ceases to exist, there is only music. But then when you stop listening, you fall back into time and wonder, 'well, what is it? What state was I in?' You had felt it was everything, and then it all disappeared." Emil Cioran

“Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.” Dejan Stojanovic

No clouds either?