Kierkegaard on reading

"I have been reading Athanasius these days-not only with my eyes, but with my whole body, with my solar plexis."
-Søren Kierkegaard as quoted in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions

Kierkegaard on being interested in too many things

"The misfortune of my life is perhaps that I am interested in far too many things and not decidedly in some one thing; my interests are not all subordinated to one thing but are all co-ordinated."
-Soren Kierkegaard as quoted in The Prayers of Kierkegaard (this is passage isn't a prayer)

exploring game worlds and eden as a video game

This may be obvious, but I think the difference between how we experience a beautiful computer game, (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Riven for example) and the way we experience our world is the relationship we have to that world. The artificial world does not have all the responsibilities that the real one does, and perhaps the newness of the format makes me see it with new eyes. Because I see a videogame as crafted, I notice and marvel at the craft.

Or is it the distance that makes it so attractive? It is that way to some degree with paintings, photos or the grass on the otherside of the fence. Is it the absence of me? Perhaps my driving force is just trying to get to a place free of me. But what is it about game worlds that is so attractive to me? In exploring abandoned buildings I get some of the same feeling. The desire to explore. What is it about horizons that so attracts us?

Relevant texts:
my post on kierkegaard and our relation to nature
C.S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress.
John Howe's blog post on Wanderlust

What about drawing? Does that help me get that feeling in the real world? Maybe
Or Photography? Yes and No.

Did Eden feel like an adventure game to Adam? Did life feel like a game? Was there play before the fall?

In many ways the world was like a game. Adam suddenly existed fully formed in a new world teaming with life. I suppose he had no memory. He did not yet know how this world, this life, worked, and what he was supposed to do. What the objective was. But then he was told. It became multiplayer. He got started, and then a things went south. But the games objectives didn't change. It became more complicated, but the rules and ultimate task are the same for us.

texan philosopher film-makers

I like philosophers turned film-makers who live in Texas.

Like Terrence Malick and Richard Linklater.

If I ever happen to be in the city where Terrence Malick wrote his thesis on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, I'll have to go dig it up in the university library and have a look at it. Malick, one of my favorite film-makers is notoriously silent, never giving so much as a single interview in decades.

If you take math as a branch of philosophy you can include Shane Carruth in the list, but I guess that's a stretch.

Kierkegaard on seeing nature as art

"The Reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp, I can—if I may put it this way—find that Archimedean point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it. I see the author’s whole individuality as if it were the sea, in which every single detail is reflected… The works of the deity are too great for me; I always get lost in the details. This is the reason, too, why people’s exclamations on observing nature: It’s lovely, tremendous, etc.—are so frivolous. They are all too anthropomorphic; they come to stop with the external, they are unable to express inwardness, depth."

-Søren Kierkegaard, Sept 11 1834 (Journals and Papers, Vol 1)

In modern times, I think surely this has to do with the loss of seeing the world as the free creation of God. Seeing it and knowing that it does not have to exist, and is held in existence by him. I have another post on this here, about the feeling of exploring a beautiful computer game vrs the real world.