Regain

Almost a year from the time I created the blog, now I finally have time to get its template done and am ready to start writing my blog. Maybe this postponement is not entirely meaningless. I was at NDHU when creating my first blog account along with a course blog. My time then was all spent maintaining the course blog at the cost of my personal blog. Yet now I am transferred to NCTU and start a new teaching job and academic life at a new place. Here I start thinking of going back to my personal blog as my life here is for the most time in solitude which, interestingly, does not look repulsive to me. I almost welcome this new solitude of mine as my age is approaching to the mid-point of a general life span. It is at this time and in this solitude that I feel the urge to keep a record of my thinking and feeling that catch me by surprise from time to time. I would like to imagine that one or two decades after I can have a chance to look back at my life in this period. I am writing here, maybe, for a future unknown to me. And by this writing gesture I might want to render that unknowable-ness foreseeable at least a bit.

Death

As for death, I personally doubt if anyone could ever be ready to die. Philosophically speaking, death is that which manifests the possibility of the impossible. In other words, it is our ultimate and final possibility that, once realized, annihilates all other possibilities we should have possessed. Because of the infinity of possibilities, we can be said free. Yet equally because we will never realize that infinity (like when confronting death that brings to all our unfolded possibilities an abrupt stop), we will always already die too early and too soon. Everyone, by nature, by the human nature as freedom, cannot but die with uttermost regret. No salvation, no redemption, only hard and cold revelation. Death, who can deny, is the deadly serious issue every young person should postpone to later days. Who knows, maybe the so-called peaceful death belongs only to those who deny, or choose to become ignorant of, the signifying effect death has already imposed upon human existence.

War

Why people always want to go to war as the final solution to all the problems, be they caused ignorantly or intentionally? Maybe human beings have been implanted in the very first place with a drive to a duel to death with one another. Isn't it one sign that humans, by nature, are always already a forsaken people by whatever god or gods high above or down below? What is worse, people like to justify the cause of wars by that very beyond where the godhead is supposed to be. I somehow believe that such a beyond does exist over there. Yet I too believe that humans are way off from ever meeting the requirement to get into or get at that beyond. As for what or who, if any, actually is present in that beyond--I firmly believe it is the question humans are neither allowed nor able to answer. To mistake ignorance as knowledge, frenziness as belief, and faith as justice--that is the very human problem that has been causing so much suffering, misery, and death in the not very long history of the pathetic beings (how can we not feel pathetic?) that assume a human form. Sometimes one cannot help holding a strong doubt that exactly because we never know what love or hope really is or even because we are born insulated from love or hope, we always treat them as the highest (read, the impossible) value worth pursuing. pursuing, yes, after shadows and illusions all the time. To believe in something or some being higher makes us pathetic, yet to discard the same belief makes us trivial. We are always at odds with ourselves. conflictual, confrontational, and antagonistic that is as we are (wo)men. Woe men.