While visiting the bookstore yesterday I happened upon a journal called Thought Provoking Thoughts. Apparently it’s “the philosophers magazine”.
One article in particular that stuck out in my mind was written by an assistant professor of philosophy in Memphis. Goes by the name of Andrew Terjesen. His article is titled: More than a feeling.
Headed up with: Why Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan is a stoic sage for our times.
Shall we find out?
He begins by stating that when a person hears the word “stoic” today, they tend to think of a person who shows indifference to pleasure and pain.
I disagree. My father was stoic. I know he felt pleasure and I know for a fact, he felt pain. And more importantly, exhibited both. Granted, my father, like Dr Manhattan, did in fact, seem indifferent to the needs of his daughters, even if he did, in all actuality care about us. Who just doesn’t visit their three daughters but one handful of times in ten years? A stoic man, as I, his daughter thought stoic meant, or a stoic man as Terjesen writes he is, emotionally indifferent?
There is a not so pleasant symmetry in all of this.
My father is dead.
Never again can I ask him a question or follow his ways on my own path to virtue. Never again can I see him upset, genuinely unhappy or excessively thrilled. I have no idea if what I say today he might hear or have an opinion of. If he does, I prefer a natural tone father and not one of billions of thoughts combined after years of death, or one of unhappiness at what I’ve become.
I think it right for me to write to you today, dearest impulse, if only to find some way of knowing, some way of articulating what I feel into what I think or vice-versa. I have never been able to fully understand relationships, not any I’ve had or any I’ve witnessed. What makes a person love another? Is there some mechanized process I’m unaware of? Do others feel as unsettled as I do, and does their uneasiness set upon them like a wart on a toe?
At any rate, I think your profundity out stands us all. I was going to write: up stands, which is probably also quite true, but I can not be certain of any term now-a-days. What means one thing to me means something entirely different to somebody else.
Along this same journal, Douglas Murphy explores the meaning of death. He says: death cannot be said to be in any way harmful to the person who has died.
Thank God for this, right?
Thank God for the intellectuals and philosophers view.
You’ll be here on October 17th. Somehow I feel credited by this knowledge. I also feel dependent on it. To see you in person is to survive some massive intellectual equation.
God bless your coming and may all the thoughts of those who pay to come to see you face in, at the very least, some interpretational gathering.
Of course, as Tony Wright recommends: Don’t ever think too much.
So I won’t. I’ll just wait.
