Life on The Verandah

Sometimes I am confused and feel stranded while facing the elements of life. But I never lose focus on two things - the philosophies in my life and the better things in my life. And I certainly believe (a verb I use carefully) man must trod his way forward and, in the passage of his journey, learn a thing or two in profundity, in a manner resembling the intelligent people of the past. Why people of the past? Because they were focused. Taking as an example a French who lived 'not so long ago', at the time of Napoleon. Jacque-Louis David, who painted pictures and painted pictures in his life. He painted with a message, be it political or artistic. He painted in unparallelled skills and power. His pictures are immortal and David becomes immortal. Rewinding the time line further back, in a world where money and power were not considered the singular scale to measure respectability (albeit power, inevitably, made the respectable more respectable in the eyes of the commoners), we see someone as powerful as Marcus Aurelius whose immortality lay not only on the fact that he served as an emperor of the most powerful empire ever on Earth but also on his being a philosopher. The philosopher-king was an ideal for the ancient intellectuals. Marcus Aurelius, himself a Stoic, wrote the famous Meditations. He focused on the philosophy that led man to a life of happiness with doctrines very much in tune with Christianity, except that Stoicism did not offer life after death, which, in the eyes of a handful of intelligent people, represented bribes to the prospective believers, and which was, to this handful, unacceptable from the perspective of respectability. I believe at the time all of the intelligent people, regardless of what they chose to believe and which path they chose to go, stayed focused and this was what made them truly successful (not those cheap successes you can find in those 'How to be Successful' guide), remarkably resilient in the passage of time and worthy of our understanding. If you look at today, all of us are distracted. In this context we shall never see someone like Jacque-Louis David or Marcus Aurelius.

As such, trying to shovel aside the confusion and keep my thought neater, I come to a conclusion that my blog, Life on The Verandah, is henceforth fully dedicated to philosophy and the another one, my first one back in 2002, Better Things in Life, shall, naturally, focus on the better things in life, including good food, fine art, books worth sharing and my novel with no pre-set message other than a criterion that all that's mentioned must be, again, better things in life, which, in a sense, looks like flows of consciousness, evidential in revealing the existence of time. Cast A Cold Eye is a vehicle to hold my Views of The Day and continues to cast a cold eye on what happens in this world. It is the only blog in which I shall sometimes use Chinese language and one for which time is of essence.