Month: January 2013

It is said, paradoxically, that we are in a knowledge-based economy but we have never taught less. We have never put such an amount of emphasis on institutions though we haven’t trained or educated less. Now I’ll explain the paradox, the nonsense. The paradox and the nonsense are in fact almost anywhere, particularly in North America; the school is becoming an institution for servants of the system. In other words, an institution of “thinking bipeds” that should only focus on maintaining the free market, self-regulating market and on maintaining this mechanics of production and multiplication of money.

This is what is called “employability”, to form the employable people; it is called ‘to reform the education from primary school to university’, to train young people to find their place in the labor market. That’s horrible!

Would be Victor Hugo employable nowadays? Would be Socrates employable? Would be Paul Verlaine or Rimbaud employable? No! So, they wouldn’t exist. But what would the mankind be with no Socrates, no Aristotles, no Rimbauds, no Verlaines, no Victor Hugos? What would mankind be without them? We would be animals!

Angels have a thousand jobs. For each job, a shape. For each task, celestial engineering in the factories of the gods. Not many of us are made according to such most minute & intricate blueprints.
In an angel’s philosophy, it was once said, two times two equals thirteen. This is not slander. Angels are not crazy, could not be further from madness. They have, insofar as any theologian understands, absolute purity of purpose. A stiletto-sharp fidelity to the task of keeping Heaven clean.
To messy-minded humans, to Homo Vorago Aperientis, so glass-clear & precise a drive makes no sense at all. It is considerably less comprehensible than the ravings of those we call insane.
Angels, unremittingly & absolutely sane, cannot but seem to poor humanity relentlessly & madly murderous.

Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.