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As given in the link I included above:

"Storytellers took up the legend of Faust and recast him in the language of the Protestant Reformation (which was, just then, running at full force). The Faust we know -- the Faust who sold his soul for knowledge -- took his present form in 1607, in Christopher Marlowe's Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus."

Later:

"The Faust that you and I recognize came later: the Faust of the German poet Goethe, the Faust in the opera. Goethe wrote about Faust two hundred years after Marlowe and Bacon."


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Some things which I have found beautiful:
(1) the dogwoods in blossom currently on my street and all over town
(2) the thunderstorm that is going on outside (I really should turn off the computer)
(3) [e^(i*pi)]+1=0 see http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A346295
(4) calculus in general
(5) Stan Getz Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars)
(6) The Beatles In My Life






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Do you find beauty in your life everyday? ever? where and what?

Angel's new granddaughter.




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Do you find beauty in your life everyday? ever? where and what?

Angel's new granddaughter.


Bless you Keiva. And thank you.


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Yes Helen, I find beauty in everyday life. It is amazing what is all around you. Some days I wake up and the birds are chirping away outside and I find that beautiful – and I smile.

Pancakes from my son on my birthday are beautiful. My Mother’s smile is beautiful. The love in my Father’s eyes every time he looks at my Mother is beautiful. My husband, waiting for me to get safely into my car before heading to his, is beautiful.

Winter storms, with snowflake jewels falling from the sky are beautiful. Summer days where the sun is so bright everything looks polished, are beautiful. And in the spring and the fall the ducks migrating are beautiful and I am awestruck.

I’ll tell you what, in my worst hour, when I thought life too heavy a burden to bear, it was ducks in a scraggly v-formation heading south, that reminded me that there is an endless rhythm to our souls and our selves and that life goes on. I was awestruck by the beauty of it and smiled for the first time in months. I always stop to watch the ducks go by.

Every day something beautiful shows itself to me and I smile.



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Dear Alex: If you think e to the minus Pi i = minus one is beautiful, old B.O.Pierce would have loved you.


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Ok, Alex, I was with you all the way to #3. (We were in the same storm front, my dear, and I DID turn off my computer, having had it taken out by lightning twice. A word of warning, if I may: if you have a dial-up connection, you should unplug the telephone wire, and if you have a cable connection, you should unplug the cable wire from your modem. That's how lightning got my computer--I learned the hard way that it isn't enough just to turn them off and trust in the surge protector.) Anyway--I looked at #4, and opened the link in #3, and thought, "Alex, you're weird!"

Every day something beautiful shows itself to me and I smile.
Oh yes, oh yes! Every time I think of you, bel, I smile. And, and, oh! How I wish each of you had a place where I feel like I do at church. Such a sense of belonging. And, and--isn't it beautiful, that we are all lucky enough to be able to own computers? That is, that makes it pretty much a given that we have enough to eat and a roof over our heads. And isn't it beautiful, the things we can do? Compared to someone like my mother-in-law who just had a hip replacement, and for whom getting out of bed is a major ordeal. And I just read in one of the Chicken Soup books about a 77-year-old lady who was a double amputee. She MADE the doctors fit her with artificial legs, learned to use them, and was utterly thrilled when she was able to do something as simple as accompany someone out to dinner, when everyone in her family and all the medical people had expected her to lie in bed till she died. Oh yes, for all our troubles, we lead very good lives indeed.








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<<Since the triumph of good over evil is beautiful, I would let the Devil claim me if I could solve the Israel-Palestine problem in a lasting way.>>

Your good sentiments duly acknowledged.. You are a sly one, Dr. Bill, for with the triumph of good over evil, there will be no Devil left to whom you might give yourself. I won't say you're a man who likes to have his cake and eat it, too, but only that you seem one. ;)


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Dear IP: I have no fear of Hell, so many of my friends are going to be there.


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<<When I say to the moment flying,
linger a while, thou art so fair!'
Then bind me in your bonds undying,
And my final ruin I will bear.>>

This is such an extraordinary statement, I can't get to the bottom of it. It reminds me of a thread we had months back about time and the paradox of it's minutest division: into moments. In the apprehension of beauty we may experience the peculiar encounter with Beauty, the abstract, the eternal. But the thing in which we encounter it: a flower, a person, is evanescent -- gone, like spring, like youth: before arriving. And here, this stark old realist, the scientist, Faust, never strives to make time stop, to tarry in the embrace of some event of beauty: He never has time, never holds it near to him, only measures with it, lives in it and beyond it at once. But let him say once, "Linger a while," and he is caught in the Devil's bonds undying. The Devil's bonds, what are they then but the abstraction he would seek in that phrase: Beauty. It seems to me, Faust is already bound in Hell. And Hell is modernity.

On a different note: Kant seems to ground ethics in the apprehension of Beauty.

And lastly: daffodils glowing in the light of a sun, low on the horizon, passing through them. Dusk, and the flight of swallows. Strangers passing in joy, or despair, or the absent everyday. Almost anything is beautiful, and to see it: very nearly unbearable.


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