Measure Twice, Cut Once

from the Eureka (CA) Times-Standard

A carpenter who keeps his clothes clean by working in the nude was arrested after a client returned home early and found him building bookcases in the buff. Percy Honniball, 50, was charged with misdemeanor indecent exposure this week for the October incident. He told officers he stripped before crawling under the client's house to do electrical work because he didn't want to soil his clothes, police said. Honniball said Thursday that working au naturel gave him a better range of motion and that a skilled craftsman can work clothing - and injury -free. "In certain situations such as demolitions where you are smashing rock you want to be clothed and protected because this rock can harm you," he said.

Flaubert on Language

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

- Gustave Flaubert

I feel, therefore I am

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, note even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism....

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, it sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect, the value of all values.


-Milan Kundera, Immortality