Wednesday, February 01, 2006

alex kidd in miracle world

from The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster:

"No one is less cynical than a magician. He knows, and everyone else knows, that everything he does is a sham. The trick is not really to deceive them, but to delight them into wanting to be deceived: so that for the space of a few minutes the grip of cause-and-effect is loosened, the laws of nature countermanded. As Pascal put it in the Pensées: 'It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles.' " (p. 120)


i really do like that. i think it is quite important to sometimes let go of reality, realism, rationality, everything definite and/or definable. of course, it's no use only living in a dream world - that would mean becoming as rigid as believing only in the world before our eyes. but even if all else fails, we can still hold on to a certain belief (i mean this in the broadest sense of the word, not in a religious one) that things happen because of... magic. wonders are wonders only if we let them be as such.

i don't believe in determinism. i don't believe in lady Fortune hiding behind every event in our lives. i don't even believe in fate. but i do believe in the power we have over our lives by sometimes deliberately choosing the 'existence' of one of these, or all of them. if all of this sounds rather blurry, then maybe it is. let me put it in other words. i don't believe that certain things in my life happened because they 'had' to happen. but i do like to 'do the magician' on myself and adhere to a certain willing suspension of disbelief, just because it makes the world more beautiful. maybe my message is then just this. let's not have reasonable grounds not to believe in miracles, and let's not search for those grounds. i like miracles, even though they are not true. deliberate blindness to their nonexistence is good enough.

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