I Can’t Stop Thinking Big

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“In a world where I feel so small I can’t stop thinking big” (Rush) “What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916)

Seneca, Moral Letter 26, “On Old Age and Death”

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“. . . it bids me distinguish carefully what I cannot do and what I do not want to do. For why should one complain or regard it as a disadvantage, if powers which ought to come to an end have failed? . . . 


But is there any better end to it all than to glide off to one's proper haven, when nature slips the cable? . . . 


Epicurus will oblige me with these words: "Think on death," or rather, if you prefer the phrase, on "migration to heaven." . . . In saying this, he bids us think on freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery; he is above any external power, or, at any rate, he is beyond it. What terrors have prisons and bonds and bars for him? His way out is clear. There is only one chain which binds us to life, and that is the love of life. The chain may not be cast off, but it may be rubbed away, so that, when necessity shall demand, nothing may retard or hinder us from being ready to do at once that which at some time we are bound to do.” (Seneca, Moral Letter 26, “On Old Age and Death”)

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