Something wonderful and beautiful and true.
This is the 70th anniversary edition. The cover and packaging for the book and CDs is quite nice. Not having heard it yet, I do question the choice of Viggo Mortensen aka “Mr. Mumbles” for the audio narration. Or maybe he’s practiced his enunciation a little since LOTR?
The other two copies that I won on ebay should be arriving soon. Much more excited about those older editions, but it’s nice to not have to use the pop-up book as my primary reading version.
A certain fog of sadness has descended upon me with certain revelations about a certain acquaintance and his actions. When the uglier sides (or are they just repressed?) of humanity are unearthed and displayed, so many latent questions are dredged up along them. How should we judge others, and how are we ourselves to be judged? As an extreme hypothetical, suppose someone found the cure for cancer and saved millions of lives but was also a murderer. Where do the scales fall? Where should they fall?
A friend who majored in video games brought up the news article about the game Flappy Bird, whose creator recently revealed that he pulled the game off the market because it was too addictive (link). Which seemed interesting to me because I’m quite skeptical that the elimination of one game, which has already spawned many clones, would meaningfully curtail game addiction. And to give up what’s been reported as up to $50k per day for such a reason seems almost crazy to me. But said friend, the only one who’s a Kantian (or at least who outwardly would admit so), brought up the fact that ethical reasoning doesn’t work in that manner, and mentioning the categorical imperative in a twitter conversation (which, in my book, deserves an award of some kind).
This would be an inconsequential piece of chatter but for my state of mind as outlined in par. 1 above. Somehow, thoughts fill those little moments of vacuum, and then I am sad. Isn’t who we hang out with, and what things we choose to do, a judgment of our character? I was reminded of an incident from college, where one of my dorm mates, whom we thought was maybe a bit eccentric and maybe a bit angry, but otherwise not of special notice in the loony bin that is Stanford, ran over his dad with his car. (Aside: I wonder what percent of the population is an acquaintance with a murderer anyway?) Had it been invented back then, wouldn’t he have been a facebook friend? Was he a bad person? I don’t know the circumstances of his situation and would find it difficult to think that his would be justifiable patricide, but does one notable bad action result in someone being bad?
Some lines of thoughts cross, and I’m left with questions. Given that ballet supports this ideal of thinness as beautiful, am I complicit in girls’ eating disorders? Since I willingly work in tech, am I guilty of promoting income inequality? Maybe these rules are such that there’s no way to win, but who’s to say that we need must play the game?
What a deliciously odd year 2013 has been. I think I’ve done so much, but also lived most of the year in a daze which hasn’t subsided. One of the perils of a whirlwind year, I suppose.
Looking back at my resolutions for this year, while I’ve checked so many of them off the list — more than I would have expected — I still feel the year was a bit of a failure in many regards. It was like winning all the battles but losing the war. Re-reading that old post, I wanted to put down some roots; in actuality, I feel even more lost than before. As tweeted, I threw everything to the wind to see what would fly.
Of the five resolutions for 2013, I think four are probably successes to varying degrees:
And of course, “be in a relationship”, a perennial favorite, remained ever elusive. I’m a slow learner, but I think there was a little progress even here.
My resolutions for 2014:
And if I finally exit this zombie-like trance, that would be fine by me.