Yesterday I saw a Youtube video. I was about to write a comment to @steevc about bicycling and I wanted to see some footage of biking in the UK - it brought me straight into the ROAD RAGE section of Youtube. Crazy how angry you can be when sitting safe in a car! The video I saw (and I saw one more before I decided that I was wasting my time), was a bloke in a large black car that somehow was annoyed to share the slim British roads with cyclists and then drives both dangerous and aggressively and tops it up with a long furious argument.
You can see it here if you like drama!
I just dropped it (after having bothered poor @steevc with it in a comment. Sorry Steve!) and wanted to get on with my comic page (which I did!), but this odd remote-bystander experience stayed with me as if it was something I had experienced. I won't come up with some wise apple talk about the folly of aggression. Like most other people on this earth I have been shouting at people in the traffic, especially when children where in the line. And that even though I at the same time knew that it would bring no good to anybody, least of all the poor sod who made the mistake. Errare humanum est... Right?
My youngest daughter came home from kindergarden when she was four years old asking me if it was a OK to swear after all (like so many other kids at that age she had a very developed sense of justice - still have at age nine, but eroding a bit in the face of reality, I suppose). I said as I always do, that I think swearing is OK. It is after all just words and I like spice, also to spoken and written language. But I knew that she already at that time questioned my authority from a purely sceptical angle, which is a good thing that I probably learned her myself, so I suspected that her doubt had some kind of outside explanation.
Her kindergarten teacher, a tall, blond and beautiful woman with the special kind of autonomous righteousness that is so typical in Scandinavian women, was loved and admired by all the children. I liked her too, but I suspected that it had something to do with her. "Is it something Mia has said," I asked. And then my daughter finally told me that while going home from the park a car driver had almost reversed his car into the line of walking children. "What the fuck are you doing, you stupid idiot!" was the words Mia had shouted and the words that bothered my youngest so much that they had her doubt the important swear-word corner of modern ethics.
I immediately told her that Mia was still morally pure: Because car owners are shit.
OK, how do I get on from this...?
Let's take the stoic sentence from above. It is always good to end with a quote... Errare humanum est.
OK, as this is morning papers you are entitled to know all the sneaky intermediate calculations that goes into making the text.
First I copy/pasted directly from Wikiquote: "'Errare (Errasse) humanum est, sed in errare (errore) perseverare diabolicum.', attributed to Seneca ..." it said. It seemed perfect. I am about to read some Seneca (here you can see that I bought a book), but two things bothered me. It seems that the words in parenthesis are from a later period than the golden age, the word diabolical also hints at some Christian influence, and at Seneca's time Christians were still mostly used as lion food and torches. So I took my Danish encyclopaedia and finds out that the quote is originally Cicero, who in his 12th Philippine speech, paragraph 5, from 43 BC Against Antonius, writes: "Cujusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare," every man can make mistakes, but only the fool will keep at it. Later at about year 400 Jerome (one of the church fathers) shortened the statement to errasse humanum est, (see here paragraph 12). And then the sentence has been brought back to Classical Latin later. Errare humanum est.
In reality this maxim has completely lost its meaning now the second sentence is removed, and is now just used as a silly excuse for erring... OK, you have had enough of this babbling. Remember to be calm and friendly in traffic... and that car owners are shit.
My friend @shortcut has started to write some posts every morning - #morgenseiten he calls it - morning-pages. Here is his explanation of the project:
It goes like this: you shall each morning write from the soul, anything going through your head.
He writes a lot more, but this is the essence :) (Read his first morgenseiten post here)
I have decided to try the same. I write from the top of my head every morning or late morning if I have been sleeping late. I only correct typos and make a headline afterwards. Else everything is left as written. Expect some of it to sound like stage directions.
