The most common line of reasoning about extra-terrestrial life says it has to be there because there's so much universe - however low you calculate the probabilities of intelligent life arising, it's still a virtual certainty. However, this leads to the Fermi Paradox: If the universe must be teeming with intelligent life, Where is everyone?...   (read more)

So I don't suppose I could very well blog about seeing my second favourite band in the universe without doing one for my very favourite - the next night....   (read more)

I've long had this essay brewing, this grand apologia about how the ZA novel is actually the ultimate sandbox for the exploration of existential themes, how I swear up and down if Graham Greene were alive today he'd be writing ZA novels, &c. I instead put it together as a talk for the recent Nine Worlds London GeekFest Convention....   (read more)

Modernity is a deal. All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die. It offers humans an enormous temptation, coupled with a colossal threat. Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within reach, but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness. Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture. ...   (read more)

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work....   (read more)

A major aspect of my putting-life-aside-until-I-get-the-freaking-novel done austerity was: I didn't read The Pale King. A lot of really totally fascinating DFWabilia has appeared on the web in this time - dead, the man just goes from strength to strength - and here it all is now!...   (read more)

It suddenly strikes me that the myth of Sisyphus has such profound resonance - that we have a myth of Sisyphus at all - because life itself is essentially a Sisyphean endeavour....   (read more)

Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance....   (read more)

This is the conclusion that turns up again and again... Everything must be its own reward....   (read more)

It occurs to me today that perhaps the proper antidote to the Existenial Outlook is to regard life instead as an opportunity....   (read more)

"How small a fraction of all the measureless infinity of time is allotted to each one of us; an instant, and it vanishes into eternity. How puny, too, is your portion of all the world's substance; how insignificant your share of all the world's soul; on how minute a speck of the whole earth do you creep." ...   (read more)

Since the periodicity of my long-running quotations series has been getting asymptotic with infinity, here are the quotes that have been piling up since the last edition...   (read more)

"He who has a why to live can endure any how." - Nietzsche...   (read more)

My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable....   (read more)

Q: Just how much Graham Greene do you intend to read, anyway? A: Every word he wrote....   (read more)

Morning now, and I am standing on the stairs to the slide of the camp site playground, soaking up the first sunlight. I am not sitting here, nor anywhere, due to the dew, which is just a monster. The surface of the world couldn't be any more drenched if a thunderstorm had stopped five seconds ago....   (read more)

Awoke rather dreamy and refreshed - especially after an extra, post-rollover hour of sleep. The new sun and fresh breeze were both blasting in the window - ah, another glorious day, imagine that. Perhaps I am God. How would you know for sure, really?...   (read more)

"From too much love of living, / From hope and fear set free, / We thank with brief thanksgiving / Whatever gods may be / That no life lives for ever; / That dead men rise up never; / That even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea." ...   (read more)

In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful....   (read more)

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world....   (read more)

Specifically, what I mean to ponder is: Has all our scientific and technological progress - in particular, the foundation-rocking understanding of the universe and ourselves that's been granted us by cosmology, astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, etc. - has all of that grand accumulated wisdom left us without a psychic pot to piss in?...   (read more)

Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean. From his present dissatisfaction man reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden....   (read more)

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Ah! and when the hour-glass has run out, the hour-glass of temporality, when the worldly tumult is silenced and the restless or unavailing urgency comes to an end...   (read more)

Abbe, and her fiance Evan, and I, are padding around in a small, dark room of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In this one small room are five, count 'em, of the world's starkly limited supply of Faberge eggs....   (read more)

Sunday evening, and swinging by Walgreens I picked up: * A new, black, 200-page, 5.5x3.5 Mead "Fat 'Lil Notebook." * Another $3.99 chrono sports watch, with alarm! Yeah! These are two of the top pieces of gear that got me through Europe last year....   (read more)