enowning
Thursday, December 13, 2007
 
In chapter Gimel, Excursus on Gravity, in The Lamentations of Julius Marantz, author Marc Estrin asks:
What keeps us from rising?

The fallen Martin Heidegger may be of some help. We, he notes, are thrown into existence, not like a pop fly, or even like a good strong peg, but like an old cigarette butt, tossed out God's window, perhaps with half a right foot [the protagonist's birth defect]. Verfall, he calls it, a fallenness prior to any corruption in the Garden of Eden. Adam, pre-apple, was already falling by virtue of mere existence.

Torn from its authentic Self, our Being plaunges downward into everydayness, into the routine habits and conventions, the idle talk, mere curiosity, and "whateverness" of the "They." We crash like a falling plane into the groundlessness of inauthentic existence, into a world in which everything is already "already," a given world, alienated and scattered far from the possibilities of authentic existence. We find ourselves simply "there," amidst incessant bustle, without knowing where we are from or where we are heading.

Pp. 102-3
That's all a bit theological; concerned with the They-ity, fallen more than thrown. Me, I'll go with the pop fly. Authenticity, is only a moment away.
 
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