My encounter with Pythagoras

This is an excerpt from that day when I came across the Pythagorean, actually I want to reproduce two excerpts from my journal in those days, Christmas and Sylvester 2005.

24.12.05
20:16

"For Arendt her Jewish looks were undeniable, they ensured that she would have an essence of Judaism where RELIGION FAILED." (L. Weissberg)

And can any home once lost, ever be regained? And once the home rejected, can any other be attained?

Christmas Night

On the way here many a thought crossed my feeble mind, after the Sabbatical disappointment over the already forsaken faith. Somehow I'm utterly nervous and not knowing why, perhaps experiencing the contempt of my solitary selfness, and taking great pains to overcome the failures of my friendship with Levy, witnessing our uttermost modern failure. But that's something I wouldn't like to reduce to terms right now and right away. Some thought I lost from yesterday's clouded night. The thinking activity (in the context of the vita activa) should be barred from the legal professions in all its forms, and perhaps religious dogma finds this activity harmful ever since there's no philosophical activity, but a philosophical tradition.

The afternoon was winterly clouded, like the feebleness of my spirit in being. But then again I can hardly remember a day when Christmas' eve wasn't rainy and utterly cold. I left the house underneath the blithering drops of rain, which filled me with a strange comfort of regaining momenta from the past. The sky seemed to me rather broken in some grey-pinkish pale, as though the Jerusalem sky would hang somewhat loose on the top-rooves of the almost miniature houses and stone-weary walls. Perhaps Jerusalem wept her wars and her suicide attempts staring at the empty chair of a king, awaited for too long but nonetheless awaited. Even amidst the blissful cold my mind is painted with desire and with the unusual conversation with the stranger, to universalize my ethos and come bluntly undone unto myself, redeemed and ameliorated as not to lose sight of my own humanity, deeply embracing it individually.

"You're the eternal motif behind all my paintings"

So said Sabrina the communist painter to Thomas, and perhaps also to Franz, dead unto the humanly spoken craving of an American actress in Vietnam.

And Thomas? What about him? Yes, the one who died in life, not unto life, waiting to bring the kingdom of God on earth, perhaps not unlike me, as I've been left waiting.

And my painting can never be seen for it's all blood-bathed in pangs of uneven desire. Across me almost wearing my chivalrous smile and eating his dinner alone, just like a death can only become died alone. An orange shirt protects his unknown body in the distance from my venomous night sailing.

Perhaps all the strangers are barely different, and there's nothing that can be atoned for. His sight no longer finds mine and I feel ridicules in my attempts to conceal my loneliness in the sight of any stranger, like trying to escape from a plane that already took off.

1.01.06
16:03

Can faith be found?

The last days have passed without major events, yet full of thingness that once put together leaves you with the sense of making a puzzle, and the more you advance the easier you realize more pieces are missing everyday. The most festive days of the Jews brought upon me a sense of comfort rarely experienced as of late, but my growing questions and my dying faith killed all its magic so that in the late afternoon I was already just waiting to disappear in my nightly banalities. I found my way to the Old City without detours, not even to think about the unfortunate circumstances of my life. I think that without this diary I would feel to die everyday, and somehow though, I do manage to avoid and escape my own eschatologies... there's still something deeply person about it. In a deconstructed and non-historical way though, but that doesn't make it less intimate and less mine. The Sylvester soiree was very charming, and although inadequate to Jerusalem, full of some beauty this city lacks for when the Jews came this was replaced with the sad monotony of madness. Like Amos Oz said, everyone's been uprooted here, except Hitler and the Messiah. Perhaps the Mutfi still lingers around.

Some old quotes:

Arendt: "These conscious pariahs gain the honesty that makes life worth living, a clear view of reality and a place in both European and Jewish society"

Rahel Varnhagen: "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life -having been born a Jewess, this I should on no account now wished to have missed".

"Anyone who'll understand how happy I am, needs to be blind to see that I can't be happy at all".