Sunday, July 26, 2009

Pleasure



Pleasure, a "state of mind", is commonly conceptualized as a positive experience, happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria. Experience of pleasure is subjective, varying among individuals and typically stimulated by eating, exercise, sexuality, music, usage of drugs. (...) More generally, pleasure is characterised by others as reduction or absence of suffering.

Epicurus and his followers defined the highest pleasure as the absence of suffering, and pleasure itself as "freedom from pain in the body and freedom from turmoil in the soul". According to Cicero (or rather his character Torquatus), he also believed that pleasure was the chief good (and, conversely, that pain was the chief evil).
The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer understood pleasure as a negative sensation, as it negates the usual existential condition, that of suffering.

in Wikipedia



"There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries."
(Sophocles)

*Photo by Honey



The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.


Wallace Stevens