Comments on: take a second/a second take

By: Eric Eicher

Eric Eicher — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:50:02 +0000

This is my favorite sentence here: “But I spent about five years after graduation trying out other kinds of work, and it became increasingly clear it was basically no less silly to play the games of grown-ups in cubicles.” Different stripes of silly really do seem to be what we're faced with, when it comes to choosing how we spend our time here. But that's ultimately an upbeat take on things, since “silly,” especially given it's long and interesting history, is, in the end, a rather pleasant thing to be. Wittgentstein in CULTURE AND VALUE: “For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.”

By: SusanSfarra

SusanSfarra — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:45:24 +0000

It's like the second viewing of a movie, you notice a lot of details you missed the first time.

By: Michael Bennett Cohn

Michael Bennett Cohn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:24:52 +0000

When I was little and I couldn't sleep, I would sometimes try counting imaginary sheep jumping over an imaginary fence. (This image must have come from Sesame Street, since sheep can't actually jump… can they?) The sheep that had already cleared the railing would gather on the far side, until they formed a dense enough crowd that no other sheep could come across. And I was still awake.

By: Tara

Tara — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:59:12 +0000

I love the idea of the clock hands engaging each other, and it's interesting that in your mother's story, it was a somewhat antagonistic relationship. Maybe because of all our anxiety about time in general. There could be different systems of time, like the rabbinic one where the lengths of hours change depending on the distribution of daylight, but the usefulness of time-telling pretty much depends on its predictability and uniformity – which I suppose kind of guarantees that it will be arbitrary.