http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ personal philosophical essays en Copyright 2015 Sun, 24 Nov 2013 20:05:23 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Sun, 24 Nov 2013 20:05:23 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:32:46 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Wed, 26 Sep 2012 07:13:16 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:35:06 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:57:24 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:43:10 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:45:43 -0500 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.]]> http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:46:31 -0500 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? http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:48:25 -0500 http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:53:28 -0500 http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:48:23 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:51:15 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Sat, 16 Jun 2007 17:49:48 -0500 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. http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ http://www.brianjaystanley.com/essays/ Fri, 01 Apr 2005 18:22:32 -0500