Down with the Philo Dept., or Why Insomnia is Bad Bad Bad

"Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it is an unanswerable objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it."

- Thomas de Quincey, "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts".


Well, Ladies, Gentlemens and other Judeans-at-large,
This is what happens when you pay too much attention to the nature of God, the hopelessness of man, and the chances of torrential rain in pre-Bronze Age Tenochtitlan. You become a philosopher. Then you die. This is how some of these tyrants died -

Calvin: Predestined
Camus: Found exit
Darwin: Became unfit
Derrida: Deconstructed
Descartes: Stopped thinking
Einstein: Diced with God
Foucault: Disempowered
Freud: Slipped
Hegel: Gave up the Geist
Heisenberg: Uncertain causes
Levi-Strauss: Eaten by natives
Machiavelli: Intriguing causes
Marx: Material causes
Ockham: Shaved beyond necessity
Pirsig,Robert: Motorcycle crashed
Plato: Caved in
Pythagoras: Squared on the hypotenuse
Rand, Ayn: Objectified ego
Rousseau: Contract job
Sartre: Nothing doing
Saussure: Parole revoked
Zeno: Run over by tortoise

A Middle English lyric

I have a gentil cok,
Croweth me day;
He doth me risen erly,
My matins for to say.

I have a gentil cok,
Comen he is of gret;
His comb is of red corel,
his tayel is of jet.

I have a gentil cok,
So gentil and so smale;
His spores arn of silver white,
Into the worte-wale.

His eynen arn of cristal,
Loken all in aumber;
And every night he percheth him
In min ladyes chaumber.


Middle English Lyrics, ed.Luria and Hoffman;Norton Critical Edition.

[N.B.for my classmates:this is not an attempt to advertise my course!]

Thus Sprach Don Chakraborty

"I was about to say 'momentous moment', but that would've sounded funny."
-On the experience of reading