Monday, November 27, 2006

Live the questions now

I first saw this on mchang's fridge. At some point I should make a collage of all these quotes and frame them up on my wall.

Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. --Ranier Maria Wilke


So the question is: how do you live a question? I suppose this quote is telling me that I shouldn't look for the answer to that one and let it hang unresolved, but that would be an answer, which is contradictory.

It's always been a disquieting yet quietly triumphant thing to me that humans are able to live with logical contradictions while knowing they're logical contradictions. Definitely wouldn't go so far as to say that Godel's incompleteness theorem explains what makes us human - it doesn't say anything of the sort - but contradictions are still an amusing and pervasive phenomena that I'm still trying to come to grips with. Does not compute... but it's kind of cool that it doesn't.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It sometimes scares me how much you and I are alike. That's a project I've been meaning to do forever but never have. I even have a list of quotes. I sense an expo-prep project.