I am a historian. I'm an average person. I used to box when I was young and I'm still passionate about the sport. I am also interested in social sciences and art. I'm quite clumsy at profiling this sort of thing, so the overall picture is perhaps chaotic. I am on the site to have pleasant conversations.

I like the silence and the feeling of having a lot of time ahead of me, which I can fill at my own pace and inclination, with things I like. For me, this is freedom. Time to live, to use as I please, for whatever I want. That is the greatest gift.

I love the slow country life, the deep, intimate conversations, the attunement. I love it when certain scents that remind me of the happy moments of grace of my childhood return to stir my senses and my life. I love nature, I love watching the fire blaze, listening to the water splash, the trees, the mountains and the earth... the earth I can touch after a long winter and feel the life flowing back into my fingers. I love the stars, the scent of summer evening flowers in the air, the smoky autumn air, the smell of glowing wood in the fireplace... the sweet smell of cookies, animals, the warm, crusty palm of my grandfather around my once childish hands, the smell of women, the cooling sensation of my mother's face on my forehead when I am feverish and small... many things... a novel could be written about this...

***

The metaphysical mutation that gave rise to materialism and modern science in turn spawned two great trends: rationalism and individualism. Huxley’s mistake was in having poorly evaluated the balance of power between these two. Specifically, he underestimated the growth of individualism brought about by an increased consciousness of death. Individualism gives rise to freedom, the sense of self, the need to distinguish oneself and to be superior to others. A rational society like the one he describes in Brave New World can defuse the struggle. Economic rivalry—a metaphor for mastery over space—has no more reason to exist in a society of plenty, where the economy is strictly regulated. Sexual rivalry—a metaphor for mastery over time through reproduction—has no more reason to exist in a society where the connection between sex and procreation has been broken. But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn’t understand that sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists—not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation. The same is true of the desire for wealth. Why has the Swedish model of social democracy never triumphed over liberalism? Why has it never been applied to sexual satisfaction? Because the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice and desire. Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire—unlike pleasure—is a source of suffering, pain and hatred.

/Michel Houellebecq/

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

/Werner Heisenberg/

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

/Emil Cioran - A Short History of Decay/

To realize that all your life—you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there's a monster at the end of it.

/Rust Cohle/

History, Philosophy, Literature, Political science, Theoretical physics