I am somewhat of a struggling writer so therefore I am an somewhat of an ardent reader. I am currently reading nine different books of various categories;
A People's history of the United States by Howard Zinn,
The End of Faith by Sam Harris,
Civil Disobedience by Henry david Thoreau,
The Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan,
The Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon,
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons,
Recipes for Disaster, The Qur'an, The Lost Gospel: The book of Q, &
An Idiot's guide to the Gnostic Gospels. A wide variety of interest. I must admit I have become intrigued with the new movie that came out a couple of weeks ago,
Watchmen. So I ordered the graphic novel and I can NOT put this book down. The artwork is good, retro now, very '80's style graphics but that is to be expected since it was written in the mid-80's but it is the story that is compelling. Anyway I get away from the point I would like to make......I really love authors who can make me look at things from a whole new perspective or that seem to verbalize the unspoken beliefs and thoughts in the caverns of my soul. There is one such quote form the graphic novel
Watchmen.
I am really shrugging off the ideas of religion in any shape or form lately and have declared to live by reason and logic. In doing so I have had a very hard time dealing with our fragile existence, this miracle of life. Such a miraculous event that I really fault noone for their belief in any god. Anyway the following excerpt from
Watchmen really hit the nail on the head of how I feel.......
" 'Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, athousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter...Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold....that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.'
'But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle...i mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!'
'Yes. Anybody in the world. But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget....I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Come...dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leaves their fingerprints most clearly.' "
Maybe that was what our bronze-age ancestors were trying to convey when summoning the legend of Eden, the breathe of life, of free will. I dunno....just a thought. Now to leave you with one more quote......
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being."
- C. G. Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections