94. 15 April 2019
Early afternoon. You took down your notice and example yesterday's blog from Facebook, mostly because you are embarrassed for putting it up in the first place. - Amorella
1258 hours. I get pumped when I am working on a new project. I had one 'like' from Penny B. a neighbor from the mid-seventies. I did have about five more hits from people checking out the sample. That's enough. I hate waving my own flag, so to speak, but I was enthusiastic enough to share at least for a day or so.
What if you had had a lot of hits? - Amorella
1303 hours. I would have still taken it down wondering why I was such a fool to have put it on Facebook to begin with.
There you are, boy, happier about it than you would be otherwise. - Amorella
1305 hours. True. Sharing discreetly fits my sense of modesty better.
You ran an errand then had lunch at Max and Erma's in north Westerville. Presently, you are facing mostly north sitting near the shelter in Heritage Park while Carol is taking her walk. - Amorella
Mr. Orndorff, it seems to me you could have left yesterday's blog page up on Facebook for a few more days.
Miss Havisham, I'm surprised you care one way or another. Souls are supposed to be patient aren't they?
Time is not a condition.
1613 hours. Why leave it up? I don't know why I tried to acquire more readers. It was silly, stupid and quite immature on my part.
Your heartanmind are having a debate over that.
1618 hours. Why bring me into it?
Your heart is angry that you took the sample down and your mind says it was the most reasonable thing to do, mainly because few cared to read it in the first place.
1621 hours. Just let it be, Miss Havisham. I'll live through it. My decision was made and I consciously carried it out. -- Why should my heart still care anyway?
Your heart cares about a lot of things you don't care about.
1628 hours. That's just stupid.
This is how you are, heart and mind are constantly in battle. This is what I, Miss Havisham, have to put up with -- bickering.
1632 hours. That's funny. Reminds me of Sartre's play, "No Exit".
Reference, orndorff. - Amorella
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No Exit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No Exit (French: Huis Clos, pronounced [ɥi klo]) is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original title is the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors. The play was first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944. The play begins with three characters who find themselves waiting in a mysterious room. It is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. It is the source of Sartre's especially famous and often misunderstood quotation "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people", a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object from the view of another consciousness.
Plot
Three damned souls, Joseph Garcin, Inès Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, are brought to the same room in Hell and locked inside by a mysterious valet. They had all expected torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead find a plain room furnished in the style of the French 'Second Empire'. At first, none of them will admit the reason for their damnation: Joseph says that he was executed for being a pacifist, while Estelle insists that a mistake has been made; Inès, however, is the only one to demand that they all stop lying to themselves and confess to their moral crimes. She refuses to believe that they have all ended up in the room by accident and soon realizes that they have been placed together to make each other miserable; she deduces that they are to be one another's torturers.
Joseph suggests that they try to leave each other alone and to be silent, but Inès starts to sing about an execution and Estelle vainly wants to find a mirror to check on her appearance. Inès tries to seduce Estelle by offering to be her "mirror" by telling her everything she sees, but ends up frightening her instead. It is soon clear that Inès is attracted to Estelle, Estelle is attracted to Joseph, and Joseph is not attracted to either of the two women.
After arguing, they decide to confess to their crimes so they know what to expect from each other. Joseph cheated on and mistreated his wife; Inès seduced her cousin's wife while living with them; and Estelle had an affair and then killed the resulting child, prompting the child's father to commit suicide. Despite their revelations, they continue to get on each other's nerves. Joseph finally begins giving in to the lascivious Estelle's escalating attempts to seduce him, which drives Inès crazy. Joseph is constantly interrupted by his own guilt, however, and begs Estelle to tell him he is not a coward for attempting to flee his country during wartime. While she complies, Inès tells him that Estelle is just feigning attraction to him so that she can be with a man – any man.
This causes Joseph to abruptly attempt an escape. After his trying to open the door repeatedly, it inexplicably and suddenly opens, but he is unable to bring himself to leave, and the others remain as well. He says that he will not be saved until he can convince Inès to trust in him. She refuses, saying that he is obviously a coward, and promising to make him miserable forever. Joseph concludes that rather than torture devices or physical punishment, "hell is other people." Estelle tries to persevere in her seduction of Joseph, but he says that he cannot make love while Inès is watching. Estelle, infuriated, picks up a paper knife and repeatedly stabs Inès. As they are all already dead, this attack does nothing and Inès even halfheartedly stabs herself, beginning to laugh. As Estelle comments on the idea of their being trapped here forever and laughs too, all three join in a prolonged fit of laughter before Joseph finally concludes, "Eh bien, continuons..." ("Well then, let's get on with it...").
Characters
Joseph Garcin – His cowardice and callousness caused his young wife to die "of grief" after his execution. He is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and deserted during an unspecified military conflict. He was unfaithful to his wife – he even recalls, without any sympathy, bringing home another woman one night, and his wife bringing them their morning coffee after hearing their engagement all night. Initially, he hates Inès because she understands his weakness, and wants Estelle because he feels that if she treats him as a man he will become manly. However, by the end of the play he understands that because Inès understands the meaning of cowardice and wickedness, only absolution at her hands can redeem him (if indeed redemption is possible). In a later translation and adaptation of the play by American translator Paul Bowles, Joseph is renamed Vincent Cradeau.
Inès Serrano – Inès is the second character to enter the room. A lesbian postal clerk, she turned a wife against her husband, twisting the wife's perception of her spouse and the subsequent murder of the man (who is Inès' cousin). Indeed, Inès seems to be the only character who understands the power of opinion, manipulating Estelle's and Joseph's opinions of themselves and of each other throughout the play. She is honest about the evil deeds she, Joseph, and Estelle have done. She frankly acknowledges the fact that she is a cruel person.
Estelle Rigault – Estelle is a high-society woman, who married an older man for his money and had an affair with a younger man. To her, the affair is merely an insignificant fling, but her lover becomes emotionally attached to her and she bears him a child. She drowns the child by throwing it into the lake, which drives her lover to commit suicide. Throughout the play she tries to get at Joseph, seeking to define herself as a woman in relation to a man. Her sins are deceit and murder (which also motivated a suicide). She lusts over "manly men,” which Joseph himself strives to be.
Valet – The Valet enters the room with each character, but his only real dialogue is with Joseph. We learn little about him, except that his uncle is the head valet, and that he does not have any eyelids, which links to Joseph because Joseph’s eyelids are atrophied.
Critical reception
The play was widely praised when it was first performed. Upon its 1946 American premiere at the Biltmore Theatre, critic Stark Young described the play as "a phenomenon of the modern theatre – played all over the continent already", in The New Republic, and wrote that "It should be seen whether you like it or not."
Selected and edited from Wikipedia - No Exit
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You smile after reading this because the bickering is as life can be.
1647 hours. Bickering, not just in my life, in everyone's life. Not as dramatic hopefully, but Sartre takes bickering to a Beyond. I'm an existentialist but not so negative as Sartre. Here are three perspectives from Wikipedia that formulate my thinking:
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Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaningto life and living it passionately and sincerely, or "authentically"
Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, thanks to Sartrewho read Heidegger while in a POW camp, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.
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[Immanuel] Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically. He explained:
All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be considered as idle dreams...."
Selected and edited from Wikipedia's -
Søren Kierkegaard and Immanuel Kant
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1841 hours. I lean much closer to Kierkegaard than to Sartre and in context my mind is tempered by Kant also.
Evening. You forgot about posting the above. - Amorella
2142 hours. I did. We watched NBC News and a couple CBS shows we DVRed last night. It was heartbreaking to watch the horrific fire at Notre Dame. My eyes welled with water though I have never personally been there. Carol has along with probably millions of other people over the centuries.
Would you have used the word "heartbreaking" had your eyes not watered?
2148 hours. No. That was my criteria for using that word rather than another. I know of few words to use for deep matters of the heart. I think I was touched because it was such an icon of the history of Western Civilization, like Westminster Cathedral in London or St. Peters Cathedral in Rome.
Tensions of the heart connect to thousands of personal memories. This is the reason you have no words. Those thousands of memories connect to thousands more. They begin with Notre Dame and spread through the history of Western Civilization. One on top of another such as you wrote, Westminster, St. Peters and on to Paris, London and Rome. Then, after the specifics on to the heading of Western Civilization and from there India and the Far East and a return to churches in Latin America and up through North America -- stopping at the National Cathedral in Washington. That's just the top of your tongue so to speak. Themes - human struggles and sorrows, wars, insurrections, revolutions. People - souls. How many souls are there, not only living souls - those souls who hold the hearts and minds of all the human beings so gifted with them that have ever been. Where do you stop Mr. Orndorff?
2207 hours. I stop with you, Miss Havisham. Why is that?
You have nowhere else to go, Mr. Orndorff. It's plain as day that with you your heartanmind stop with me. Above is evidence of it. Circumstantial, you might say, but that's a condition of life, of being.
2212 hours. I rarely know how these sessions are going to begin and have no knowledge how they are going to end. Here I am wordless, once again.
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