The Gratitude Thread

[JLT]

Probably the best essay on Thanksgiving was written by Jon Carroll for the San Francisco Chronicle, who reprinted it every year. It sums up neatly what I feel about the holiday:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/A-song-of-thanks-a-grat-etude-6652916.php

May all of you enjoy your dead dinosaur (or vegan/vegetarian options for the rest of you), and reflect on all the things we have to be grateful for.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

To all our American cousins, I hope you have a very happy Thanksgiving, without any mishaps or disasters.

I am thankful to this forum for bringing us all together, and thankful to you all for putting up with my occasional brain-farts (and the more than occasional times that I just went on and on and on, etc.)

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

What Graham just said. Ditto.

 

[Louanne Learning]

I'm grateful I have a brain, and it's working pretty good.

 

[Homer Potvin]

I'm grateful I have a brain, and it's working pretty good.


View attachment 782

Pretty well, Louanne... pretty "well." Haha.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Pretty well, Louanne... pretty "well." Haha.

I love this! lol, thanks

 

[Homer Potvin]

I love this! lol, thanks

Good brains waste not stuff things good.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Good brains waste not stuff things good.

Right now I am reading about the philosopher Derrida and how he opposed the traditional philosophy that writing was secondary to spoken speech. It goes all the way back to Plato, who wrote in Phaedrus :

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

But Derrida wrote:

“The progress of writing is thus a natural progress. And it is a progress of reason.”

And -

“the operation that substitutes writing for speech also replaces presence by value: to the I am or to the I am present thus sacrificed, a what I am or a what I am worth is preferred. “If I were present, one would never know what I was worth.” I renounce my present life, my present and concrete existence in order to make myself known in the ideality of truth and value. A well known schema. The battle by which I wish to raise myself above my life even while I retain it, in order to enjoy recognition, is in this case within myself, and writing is indeed the phenomenon of this battle.”

 

[CatrionaGrace]

That's all well and good, but it's too early in the year for me to read philosophy.