
Life is an art,
All things show it;
I heard it once,
And now I know it.

Rapacious Time feasts on all things
Commandeers it all within his reign,
Ousts everything from its primeval place.
Nothing is granted for long to remain.

Existence precedes
the secondhand identity;
Essence follows
the primary reality.
Where a fact finds a being,
Man defines a meaning.
P.S. The tenet of Sarte’s Existentialism is “Existence precedes Essence.” People love to criticize it because it lays bare to the starkest truth of life, even though they are all aware of it. Man defines himself where he stands in his life vis-a-vis his contemporaries, measuring himself against the burgeoning careers and just moderately settled lifestyles of his peers. I find this school of philosophy applicable to Charles Horton Cooley’s sociological theory of “Looking Glassed Self,” stating that you become what others think you are. Although I do not want to wholly subscribe to either of the thoughts, I can see where these thoughts come from: Human sentience, that is. Our faculty is rather instinctive than reasoning, physical than metaphysical because it reacts to an external stimuli much more than to internal principles of judgment. And I guess the age we are living in now is the apotheosis of sentient modus vivendi in many aspects…

Don’t tell me he is
he shouldn’t be;
You tell it to me
It won’t change me.

Science may scorn, Reason may rescind
The sound of the unseen, the shadow of the departed;
To me it is more sentient, sensuous to my heart,
One peculiar delight, than the luster of intellect.
P.S. It’s Halloween, the most popular pagan day of a Gregorian calendar year in the States. Originally a Celtic custom, the celebration of Halloween has been voluntarily and willingly observed as an innocuously playful day of entertainment that gives a celebrant, consciously or unconsciously, a jocund license to consider a daring magical excursion to a thin borderline between the id in the form of expressing the primeval supernatural awe and the ego of purging it in a way that conciliates such restive primordial instinct under the aegis of cultural tradition. In fact, it is a way of letting people have outflows of the rigor of contemporary lives in a socially accepted way. In this regard, the Halloween celebration in American is something of a folk carnival, a carnival of Sleepy Hollows, obscure witches and wizards, the headless huntsman, and Charlie of the chocolate factory, all in a phantasmal march for Trick or Treat with satchels full of candies and chocolates at night. After all, who would defy the sweetness of the sweet?…

Small things do not pontificate,
For they present you
A pleasantry without much ado
And a lasting, simple delight.
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