tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2008-08-15:/essays//3 2014-04-26T00:11:11Z personal philosophical essays Movable Type Pro 4.23-en tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2013:/essays//3.209 2013-11-25T01:05:23Z 2014-04-26T00:11:11Z

The universe is unraveling by the hour.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com I studied entropy in college, but homeownership has clothed the naked concept and catapulted it into my daily consciousness. I cannot trip on a crooked floorboard or pry open a warped door without seeing my home as a lab of the laws of physics. tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2013:/essays//3.202 2013-04-24T11:32:46Z 2013-05-06T11:26:39Z

Beneath the intelligible there is only the unintelligent.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com Whenever I get sick or injured, I am dismayed to discover how little control I have of my life. Because someone sneezed a germ too small to see into my bloodstream, my universe shrinks to a pillow and sheets. My relation to my body resembles a privy council's relation to an adolescent king. I am thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its whims. tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2008:/essays//3.133 2012-09-26T11:13:16Z 2013-04-05T11:14:45Z

The search for soul's gold leads to the paradoxical disappointment of getting what one wants.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com What is the X we always imagine but never discover in things we desire? Dissecting my desires, I cannot tell what that unknown something is. I only postulate its existence negatively, by subtracting the reality from the expectation and finding a lack, like a chemist who knows something evaporated because the products weigh less than the reactants. tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2008:/essays//3.132 2012-03-19T22:35:06Z 2012-07-23T01:01:54Z

A survey of history prompts the conviction that mortality exonerates immorality.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com The persistence of utopianism despite so many centuries without a utopia reveals a poignant conundrum. The world is getting no better, but that cannot quell the hope of a perfect society, for hope is born of unhappiness, and the world is getting no better. What refutes the dream, sustains it. tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2010:/essays//3.134 2012-01-05T12:57:24Z 2012-03-19T22:32:11Z

A study of others reveals the self as a mosaic of otherness.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com In high school history classes, I never thought about history having actually happened around living people. The War of the Roses and French Revolution were not tumultuous events that shook and took lives, but lessons in textbooks I must memorize for quizzes. Considering the victims of Bubonic plague died six hundred years ago, being dead seemed their essence, and I forgot they faced their impending destruction like I will, hearts pounding, having only known life. tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.39 2010-09-02T21:43:10Z 2011-03-22T11:40:23Z

A gray, rainy evening yields the comforting thought that life keeps its promises when it makes none.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com Though somber at funerals, I have felt a more stinging sadness sometimes at weddings. Into my mind, uninvited, enters the thought that all this champagne and merriment must end, that in a hundred years not a reveler in the room will be above ground. The thought of death enters such vibrant scenes as the greatest contradiction, a fate one feels is impossible yet knows is inevitable. tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.40 2010-03-30T21:45:43Z 2011-03-22T11:40:30Z

A trip to San Francisco reveals the city as an enclave of order within the rough lap of nature.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com This was the world as the human mind had willed it to be, conceived it then created it according to its Euclidean desires. It was a world in which nature had no place and no right to be, except where expressly invited by sovereign man. Thus the only green I saw was the small trees planted along the streets, evenly spaced and neatly pruned, their tangle of roots invisible beneath the ground, their trunks disappearing through encircling iron grates. tag:www.brianjaystanley.com,2008:/revelations-of-life//3.41 2009-10-01T21:46:31Z 2011-03-22T11:41:34Z

The necessary sin of eating produces tension between the mind's prudery and the body's savagery.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com is our body. Every atom in this moving breathing edifice called me was looted from other existences, through the food that I, or while I was in the womb my mother, ate. My living tissues are compacted of bits of the dead, my muscles were once cows' muscles, my eyeballs were carrots.]]> tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.37 2009-09-15T21:48:25Z 2011-03-22T11:41:44Z

Recollections and reflections on poetry, beauty, music, eloquence, and the conquests of great individuals attest the potency of passion.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com When I listen to music, I wonder why I bother to write. If art should impassion, then music is art, and all other arts are music's understudies. Poems and paintings must go through the brain, using thoughts to stir feelings, but music has a backstage pass to the soul. Most cultures' mythologies have given music a divine origin, and what modern headphone-listener could wonder why? How else could arrangements of vibrating air dissolve us into ecstasy? tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.46 2009-04-25T21:53:28Z 2012-08-24T01:30:31Z

On dealing with the discovery that the world does not know your name nor wishes to learn it.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.43 2008-04-04T21:48:23Z 2011-03-22T11:42:41Z

An account of waking at night to a bedroom, a body, and a life that have lost their familiarity.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.45 2007-12-01T22:51:15Z 2011-03-22T11:43:06Z

A morning beach walk in the Pacific Northwest leads to the realization that there is no such thing as an ordinary day.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com But if not mine, whose world have I stumbled into? Did God abandon creation to me? Did blind chance splatter matter into this miracle? I'd unfurl the flowers' petals and uncoil their stems to know, for they seem like signs, but no signatures are engraved within, not in characters I can read. tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.44 2007-06-16T21:49:48Z 2011-03-22T11:43:17Z

A reflection on the earth as life's home amid a universe of nothingness.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com By day we are residents of towns and states and countries, but night reveals a different citizenship. Gazing up through the world's open roof at the worlds beyond, with awe and uncertainty we confess ourselves inhabitants of infinity. tag:72.34.46.131,2008:/~brianjay/revelations-of-life//3.36 2005-04-01T23:22:32Z 2015-03-18T21:22:40Z

The vastness and variety of California stirs a desire to grasp the whole of life in a single experience.

Brian Jay Stanley http://www.brianjaystanley.com This whole wide earth is a great Diaspora of beauty, and there is no way to see that beauty unless we travel to it. To stand still is to miss out on life. The reason of my discontent was not that I never found a place worth staying, but that I always saw another place worth going.