The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 10:33 pm
https://youtu.be/mTDs0lvFuMc?si=_pC0aiebYq6bKX9f
"Benjamin rushes to the hospital in perhaps one of the most memorable part of this movie, we see a montage of seemingly random events, narrated by Benjamin. This interweb of mundane people doing every day tasks, that at first seem to be pretty innocuous and have no connection with one another, lead us to the heart wrenching revelation that Daisy had been hit by the taxi driver and as a result her lifelong dream of theater and dance were shattered as her legs were mangled by this incident." medium
Of course, Daisy’s leg was no ordinary leg. It was the leg of a world-renowned ballet dancer. And now, because of these “intersecting lives and incidences out of anyone’s control”, her life was forever changed.
And this works the same for all of us, of course. We think we are free to go about the business of living our lives autonomously given free will. And up to a point this is true. But how is this point to be determined?
In a large sense our intertwining lives are akin to countless balls on a gigantic pool table. We zig and zag, caroming into each other in ways no one can truly grasp. Yet we can potentially create havoc in another’s life simply by stepping back into our apartment to retrieve a coat.
And when people’s lives are changed they meet new people, have new experiences, come into contacts with whole new ways of understanding the world.
In other words, the inextricable and ofttimes precarious, helter-skelter world of daseins.
Also:
From the AP wires:
The night sky may be a lot starrier than we thought. A study suggests the universe could have triple the number of stars scientists previously calculated. For those of you counting at home, the new estimate is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 300 sextillion.
And here we are on this tiny little planet in the vastness of it all trying to speculate on what it all “means”.
Here is how I [often] see things:
Albert Camus speculated that meaning is existential. And by this he meant that, on the wheel of life, there is no ontological rim or teleological hub. There are only the individual spokes [daseins] joined together by whatever God or ideology or philosophical claim of “noumenal reality” that is made.
We come from nothing, live out our 70 odd years and then return to nothing. And that can only be as meaningful as we construe it to be.
And how many other life forms orbiting all these stars are pondering the very same mysteries?
Why not just be dumbfounded by all the things we don’t even know that we don’t know yet?
And what if there is an infinite number of parallel universes in turn?
Where does “I” fit into it all?
"Benjamin rushes to the hospital in perhaps one of the most memorable part of this movie, we see a montage of seemingly random events, narrated by Benjamin. This interweb of mundane people doing every day tasks, that at first seem to be pretty innocuous and have no connection with one another, lead us to the heart wrenching revelation that Daisy had been hit by the taxi driver and as a result her lifelong dream of theater and dance were shattered as her legs were mangled by this incident." medium
Of course, Daisy’s leg was no ordinary leg. It was the leg of a world-renowned ballet dancer. And now, because of these “intersecting lives and incidences out of anyone’s control”, her life was forever changed.
And this works the same for all of us, of course. We think we are free to go about the business of living our lives autonomously given free will. And up to a point this is true. But how is this point to be determined?
In a large sense our intertwining lives are akin to countless balls on a gigantic pool table. We zig and zag, caroming into each other in ways no one can truly grasp. Yet we can potentially create havoc in another’s life simply by stepping back into our apartment to retrieve a coat.
And when people’s lives are changed they meet new people, have new experiences, come into contacts with whole new ways of understanding the world.
In other words, the inextricable and ofttimes precarious, helter-skelter world of daseins.
Also:
From the AP wires:
The night sky may be a lot starrier than we thought. A study suggests the universe could have triple the number of stars scientists previously calculated. For those of you counting at home, the new estimate is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 300 sextillion.
And here we are on this tiny little planet in the vastness of it all trying to speculate on what it all “means”.
Here is how I [often] see things:
Albert Camus speculated that meaning is existential. And by this he meant that, on the wheel of life, there is no ontological rim or teleological hub. There are only the individual spokes [daseins] joined together by whatever God or ideology or philosophical claim of “noumenal reality” that is made.
We come from nothing, live out our 70 odd years and then return to nothing. And that can only be as meaningful as we construe it to be.
And how many other life forms orbiting all these stars are pondering the very same mysteries?
Why not just be dumbfounded by all the things we don’t even know that we don’t know yet?
And what if there is an infinite number of parallel universes in turn?
Where does “I” fit into it all?