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“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
why hold onto all that?
and I said,
where do I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God, 1995.
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A tale of two entropies.
“All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.”
According to Thomas Browne, the physician and author of Religio Medici, “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.”
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A failed supernova is an astronomical event in which a star suddenly brightens as in the early stage of a supernova, but then does not increase to the massive flux of a supernova.
They could be counted as a subcategory of supernova imposters, sometimes misleadingly been called unnovae.
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Initially, the rope broke when the Russian revolutionary Bestoujeff was hanged; “Nothing succeeds with me,” he said. “Even here I meet with disappointment.”
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Iceblink is a white light seen near the horizon, especially on the underside of low clouds,, resulting from reflection of light off an ice field immediately beyond.
The fear of returning to one`s childhood home is nostophobia (the opposite state of nostalgia) combined with its comorbidity ecophobia: fear of the house.
Moral conversion is a relatively rare event in a person’s normal development.
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Adam Rainer, the only person known to have both dwarfism and gigantism.
At 19 years old he was 4 feet 8 inches tall, by the time he was in his 30’s he was 7 feet tall.
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Looking at a lamp that flared at his bedside, Voltaire said, “The flames already?”
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Castration—believed to extend the life span a few years—was popular in the Middle Ages. Eunuchs do live longer than uncastrated men. A sterilized dog or cat, male or female, will live, on average, two years longer than unsterilized dogs and cats.
Emerson said, “After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.”
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A rare first-person account of Cotard’s delusion – the belief that you’re dead – is by writer Esmé Weijun Wang who describes her own episode of psychosis and how she came to believe, and later unbelieve, that she was dead.
“Somatic details figure heavily in these recollections: what I wore, what I looked like. I told myself, through mirrors and dressing-up and Polaroids and weighing myself, You have a body. The body is alive.
But the more that I tried to remind myself of the various ways in which I did, in fact, seem to have a body that was moving, with a heart that pumped blood, the more agitated I became.
Being dead butted up against the so-called evidence of being alive, and so I grew to avoid that evidence because proof was not a comfort; instead, it pointed to my insanity.”
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James Baldwin explained why black people don’t have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children.
By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs.
That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.
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Everybody inside the afterlife is packed together. All at one point.
The 16th-century Utopians, Thomas More and Antonio de Guevara, allowed no decrepit old people in their fictional lands.
“Old people are miserly; they do not acknowledge disinterested friendship; only seeking for what can satisfy their selfish needs.”
States Aristotle’s Ethics.
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Three unique markers of frailty have been proposed:
(a) loss of any notion of invincibility
(b) loss of ability to do things essential to one’s care
(c) loss of possibility for a subsequent life stage.
The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus, pounded to death with pestles in the fourth century B.C., said, “Pound, pound the pouch containing Anaxarchus. You pound not Anaxarchus.”
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The moon is 1/400th the size of the sun but also 1/400th the distance from earth which results in the moon and the sun being the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination
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Cross-entropy method. The pineal gland is your internal clock.
The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.
States Wittgenstein.
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Babies born prematurely—who often have falsely mature faces—are imagined to be difficult and irritable, and people are less willing to volunteer to take care of them.
So, too, a study of abused children under court protection in California and Massachusetts found that a disproportionate number of them were “unattractive.”
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Classical notions about the status of humanity may be inferred by the etymology of ancient words for man.
Latin homo means “of the earth, earthling”, probably in opposition to “celestial” beings.
Greek anthropos means “low-eyed”, again probably contrasting with a divine perspective.
An Indian Proverb states, “The eyeless ant asked God: Give me eye-lashes.”
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jordan tierney 