Absurdity

"But above all, [youth] is a haste to live that borders on waste."

"There are races born for pride and life."

"The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation."

"To feel one's attachment to a certain region, one's love for a certain group of men, to kow that there is always a spot where one's heart will feel at peace - these are many certainties for a single human life."

"Everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

I renewed my love for Albert Camus a couple of nights ago in the train, reading the essay he wrote "Summer in Algiers." I was without a pen, a found myself dog-earing the book (which I never do) to point to the beginnings of what I would have underlined, eventually resorting to underlinin with my fingernails, knowing how easily this kind of marking gets lost or the technique forgotten. But I couldn't just go on reading without putting some kind of mark in the book to show my enthusiasm. It is beautiful philosophy, existentialism, it sometimes seems bleak, and is commonly the philosophy of suicidal people, believing there is no meaning to life. But Camus' argues that this life is just so beautiful, there may be no meaning, but this life is so beautiful because of it.

This is where I stand. Life is just so damn beautiful, enjoy it!

Weather, and Time

It was an amazing day in Cologne, quite untypical for this time of year, and you can see the people absorbing it in, because they know that it could be the last beautiful day for months. So when my roommate, Manuela, a geography major, invited me to go to the rhine to study, although I had nothing specific to study, I agreed to go along. At some point we stopped chatting and got working while we were sitting there in the shade near the river, and at some point broke the silence and said, "I just can't get my head around this," explaining " I know what the words say, but it's so incomprehensible." She began explaining the concept that some of the stars in our sky are thousands of light years away, so the fact that we can see them today means that they existed thousand of years ago. It is a huge concept, to imagine that something is so far away, and the travel of light which we assume as instantaneous, is slow enough that it can take thousands of years to arrive in our sight.

I think it's rather cool though, and I told her this, our sun, which on the universal scale can be taken as a representation for us, and the life on this earth. Because we live from the sun, and it feeds us. And we are (probably) the only living creatures growing from this sun. Our planet my very well end, life may end, and the planet may disintegrate. But in thousands or millions of years, there may be life living on a planet that is thousands or millions of lightyears away, they will see out star, our sun, and they may not know that it represents us, but it is still one way that we exist, essentially through these waves of light that it is sending off into the universe.

It's so huge, and hard to understand, and even explain. But that's the beauty of our life, that it is so tiny, but part of something so huge that we can't even understand it. So I told her this and I said "You know, don't feel bad that you can't understand your homework, because not being able to comprehend it is the beauty of the world. So your frustration, is actually why the world is so amazing.

Typefaces

I love typography, it was one the most evocative aspects of the design when I started my interest in it. Even before I was interested in design I have different fonts of handwriting and I was always (and still am) twisting and changing the shapes of the letters that I wrote. I was writing lists with different "fonts" for headers, and body copy.

But one of the interesting concept of typography, when you are designing with type you have another person's work within your design, the font design that they created has now become a part of your work, and will live on. I used to tell a then-boyfriend of mine that I want to design the next helvetica, and he (a non-designer) then forward called me the font nerd. He couldn't understand why I would want to design a font, although it is used all over the world, no-one knows who designed it, and you seem to be a non-entity once the font gets release to designers. But that is the key, your font lives on as your own, it's not important if people know who created it, because you are in the font, and every time your font is used, you are there on the page.

Repercussions

I imagine the world to be a big swimming pool, rippling surface of the water is representative of all the ideas, and movements and individual character makes. Each moving character has ripples going out from it, changing the surface of the water, and moving other things with it. In general life the ripples would look like a normal swimming pool bouncing around, some small, some slightly bigger, but not a lot really going on. Big thinkers and changers are moving the water with extreme force and causing large waves, some characters are completely still just being moved by the waves and ripples that hit them. Some people are making a splash, which seems huge in the moment, but minutes later after the initial shock, everything is back to the normal subtle rippling of the water. Big groups of people can work together to create a wave, and people coming one after the other can create a current. But many people are just sitting there, taking it all in, letting the waves wash over them and moving with the current, not doing anything to make themselves known other than having the ripples of others bouncing off of them.