Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Random Useless Thought of the Day

(Wouldn't it be cool if that really were a daily feature?)

Novels only get written by novelists, and histories only by historians. We never read personal accounts of those who did not survive, or of those who did not care to write. We never hear the personal feelings of those whose personal feelings do not include the need to share their personal feelings. We can't read the personal diaries of illiterate peasants, or the philosophy of those who thought that writing philosophy books was nonsense. We are limited to the poetry of poets and the speeches of those who had an audience. And who is there to tell us what it is like to wish to be silent?

1 comment:

e-kvetcher said...

I don't know if this is a related thought...

One of the arguments of the proponents of Intelligent Design is that if any of the fundamental constants and laws of physics were off by even a tiny bit, the Universe would not be able to exist.

My rebuttal is that we happen to live in the Universe where these constants worked out and so we are around to notice this fortuitous fact. There could have been an infinite number of previous Universes where the constants did not work out and so the Universes collapsed or exploded or whatever.