overcast/schopenhauer

i went for a walk to the market earlier today. while on my walk i had a flashback to my days as an undergrad at cal as a student of philosophy. for some reason the overcast day triggered a specific emotion combined with a particular framework of higher-order logical thinking that took me back to a period of time when i was spending most of my waking hours consumed with schopenhauer. his was a life’s work of methodically building from kant’s philosophy a system of utter and complete pessimism.
i wrote a paper about the inherent “optimism” that i found in schopenhauer. even this man who devoted his life to proving that human existence is basically a piece of shit involving much suffering had a fond place in his heart for the contemplation of the platonic ideals of beauty and perfection. (remember plato’s allegory of the cave, where we experience only the imperfect and wavering instances of shadows on the wall made by patterns which are the true and pure archetypes of “ideal” forms?)
whew. this is a fucking long explanation of something that i just felt in a moment, but if you’re still with me, relief from the pain and suffering in life came, for schopenhauer, in the form of art, and the purest form of art is music. basically, i argued in my paper that even one of the most rigorously pessimistic thinkers in the history of philosophy caved in to a belief, or faith, in the ability of the human mind to transcend this brutal, chaotic and meaningless life through meditation of things beyond this world.
on this grey and somewhat depressing (weather-wise) berkeley afternoon, somewhere between my apartment and the distraction of picking through fragrant crates of nectarines and peaches, i experienced a rapid review of the development of my thinking. i came to the conclusion that i have more faith and belief in “spiritual” matters than i ever have. maybe it’s a function of getting older.
the fucking carpal i got from typing this post is definitely a function of getting older. or maybe it’s a symptom of overall windbaggedness.