Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories. Why does a particular action – such as getting married in church, fasting on Ramadan or voting on Election Day – seem meanfull to me? Because their friends and neighbors also share the same view. People constantly reinforce each other’s believes in a self perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes. Yet over decades and centuries the web unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history, to watch the spinning and unraveling of these webs, and to realize that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendentes.
Tag: meaning
Simon Leys – The Hall of Uselessness
In his last work, Kafka described the search for salvation; Flaubert, the quest for meaning. But these pursuits take us into mysteries no mortal can fathom. So, it seems strangely appropriate that death should have intervened, ensuring these heroic explorations remain open – forever.
“The mob reads confessions and notes, etc., so avidly because in their baseness they rejoice at the humiliations of the high and the weakness of the mighty. Upon discovering any kind of filies they are delighted. He is little like us! You lie, scoundrels: he may be (little and vile) anything, but differently, not like you.”
INQUIRIM VITAE 