For your edification tonight, I present three essays by old Bertie, in audio form. A couple of hours of listening that might expand your mind.<\/p>\n
(It’s not him doing the reading–his voice, which I may share with you later–was not nearly as appealing as this reader’s.)<\/p>\n
The essays are:<\/p>\n
It occurs to me, reading the conclusion of that last one, that Russell’s early idea of a what a free man can believe lines up pretty much identically with what Lovecraft uses as the basis for the existential horror underlying his work<\/a>. Both men look at a stark, uncaring universe, that doesn’t give a shit about them, and respond in very different ways. Lovecraft sees this as a fundamentally horrific idea, where as Russell sees a kind of glory in the fact that this leaves you free to build what you can in the face of this absolute universal apathy. Here’s that ending:<\/p>\n Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n