So you have wandered into the realm of Alan Watts. Good for you.
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I'm reading all over the place these days. One thing leads to another.
This morning I was reading Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man (1733) and appreciate his call for rationality:
Take Nature's path and mad Opinion's leave;
All states can reach it, and all heads conceive;
Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell;
There needs but thinking right and meaning well:
My favorite Alexander Pope poem was one that was commissioned by the Queen, who wanted one that was short enough to be engraved on the collar of one of the dogs she kept at Kew Gardens. It ran:
"I am Her Majesty's dog at Kew
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?"
"I am Her Majesty's dog at Kew
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?"
This footnote perfectly captures the absurdity, hilarity, and philosophy of Ankh-Morpork in general and the Patrician in particular. (From Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms).
"Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures—in pork that doesn’t exist yet—led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does."
It also perfectly portrays the absurdity of stock trading in general. Reminds me of the tulip economic panic in Holland in ye olde days of economic trial and extreme error.
Investing in its most basic form, of course, makes a lot of sense: I give someone money to develop and sell a product and they pay me back and give me some of the profit. Then we decide that we want to do this on a large scale so rather than hoping that one person will invest a million dollars to start my company I get 10,000 people to buy a share for $100 each. But when you start getting into futures trading and short markets, that's when it starts to get absurd.
Terry simply took that absurdity to its logical conclusion.
"Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures—in pork that doesn’t exist yet—led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does."
It also perfectly portrays the absurdity of stock trading in general. Reminds me of the tulip economic panic in Holland in ye olde days of economic trial and extreme error.
Investing in its most basic form, of course, makes a lot of sense: I give someone money to develop and sell a product and they pay me back and give me some of the profit. Then we decide that we want to do this on a large scale so rather than hoping that one person will invest a million dollars to start my company I get 10,000 people to buy a share for $100 each. But when you start getting into futures trading and short markets, that's when it starts to get absurd.
Terry simply took that absurdity to its logical conclusion.
For Christmas that year, Julian gave Sissy a miniature Tyrolean village. The craftsmanship was remarkable.
There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and tin Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, "If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today."
Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and tin Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, "If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today."
Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
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