rattus rattus’ blog

If you really want to be tolerant
the first thing you have to learn
is to tolerate intolerance;
your very own as much as others,
and not any less our world’s confinement.

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You need to apply some weight
in order to see how much nothing is.

. . . ~ ~ ~ . . . should I, or should I not? Could I now or am I to do it later? May I ever or could I never? Should I not, should I still? I will, I will not, no I will, yes, I will, shall I? I do it right now, or have I already, or am I going to … to … should I, or should I not?

It’s done, isn’t it?

Our dog is the most beautiful. And not just this, when I dig my nose into her fur I can smell the bouquet of wild honey.

I always wanted to know how I smell. But nobody dares to tell me.

Given that I do not nose how smelly my dog is (because others did dare to tell me this) one has to conclude that I am as smelly as my dog, right?

Thus, no one dares to tell me, actually, that I smell like a dog
because I do.

[Ratta says: Open doors can be used both ways.]

A friend just told me a wonderful story of today’s after lunch coffee klatch. They were cutting apart a longish piece of pastry (a Nußstangerl) and had a little talking about who prefers ends and who likes middle parts more. There she said she didn’t like ends, she would prefer beginnings.

Go ahead!

Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way. And then there were the imaginary dragons, and the a-, anti- and minus-dragons (colloquially termed nots, noughts and oughtn’ts by the experts), the minuses being the most interesting on account of the well-known dracological paradox: when two minuses hypercontiguate (an operation in the algebra of dragons corresponding roughly to simple multiplication), the product is 0.6 dragon, a real nonplusser. Bitter controversy raged among the experts on the question of whether, as half of them claimed, this fractional beast began from the head down or, as the other half maintained, from the tail up.

— Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad. Harvest Book 2002 (original Polish edition 1967). Page 57, chapter “The Third Sally Or The Dragons Of Probability”.

In response to “two truths” by Siona van Dijk.

At the root of paradoxes

To see the roots of a tree
you may dig (carefully), or
just close your eyes.

However,
to see we need to move.
(This is why we often see
so clearly what is absent.)

The absence of connections
warrants the truth you may trust.

But to be free, my friend,
just keep your eyes on the trees
while you move on.

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