Packing

Last weekend, Eddie showed me a trail near his new school which reminded me of where I used to go running when I was living in Gothenburg a decade ago. Lacing up my Reebok All Terrain shoes, I thought I would give it a shot before I start packing. All in all, it turned into a nice 8 km run, bringing my total volume for this week up to 70 km. So now, I only have ten more kilometres to go before I am fully ready to leave for Indonesia.

Today, at work, I picked up my old copy of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies which made me think of the impact it had on me as an undergraduate student. Still, it seems no less relevant for the debates that I am having today. As I head upstairs to pack my blue swimming trunks, I thought I should cite a few lines:

“This sweep, this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach (and of the Marxian as well) is, I believe, connected with æstheticism, i.e. with the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness […] But here I must protest. I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist’s desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself”