Welcome to Daedalus' Labyrinth

This blog has been created with the intention of posting online some ideas, points of view, histories, stories, tales and anything else that its creators want to write about.

The posts will be signed as from "Daedalus" or from "Uranus", therefore, differenciation will be easily noticed.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

A "Missed Conception"




I decided to write this article when my comment to your last post was getting too large !

I know you are not a fan of Machiavelli, but he used to say that "Nothing is more destructive to itself than the excess of freedom".

I believe that we often mistake the concepts of freedom and happiness.
Sometimes they can be so different.
Sometimes, they may be coincident.
Like a caged bird (Una gabbia andó in cerca di un uccelo, haha). For a bird, happiness and freedom are equally represented by their flight.
Birds are ultimate free creatures. They don't need their homes, they can change it whenever they want. They don't need money, neihter garbagge nor big goals.

Humans, however, are wingless "lonely two-legged creatures". Therefore, some of us feel the need to possess a large amount of wealth, huge palaces, the achievement of grand objectives. Churchill used to say that we are all prisioners of our own minds.
I understand that quote in the following way :
"We humans have become slaves of our own racionality. We built a culture that evolves faster than our brain's development itself. We have become in need and completly dependent of our cultural creations. We need our homes, we need our technologies, we need our poems. We live a life that is artificial in it's very essence".
Nonetheless, it is still possible to find happiness despites being utterly consumed by the daily logistics of life.
My actual and personal idea on human freedom is that a human being may only achieve true freedom through death.

Written by Daedalus in reply to Uranus' last article.

Freedom - Libertà - Liberdade - Freiheit - Libertad - Liberté

Yes, six languages, but they're still not enough to explain the meaning of the concept of "freedom". No one, nothing could ever give an universal definition of what is though to be the biggest and most unreachable desire of mankind, nevertheless, a lot of writers, philosophers, almost everyone tried to do that, without great achievements.
As a matter of fact, in my opinion, freedom is an individual feeling, a personal goal, and in its individuality it shows itself in different ways. In few words: "Freedom changes from person to person".
One would expect everyone to love the idea of being free, without any boundaries, controlled just by his own will. But many of us don't know that people who seek the conventional ideal of freedom are fewer than what we'd expect. 


Franz Kafka wrote that “It's often safer to be in chains than to be free” and  “You are free and that is why you are lost”


Isn't that true? Human beings are not made to live alone, to hang around without an objective. Well, actually this is freedom in its raw meaning. To know noone, to care only about yourself, to have no goal, no destination. In this weird condition, a man would be lost, as Kafka, rightfully said.

But.mankind changed nature, the world, everything, and we can even change the concept of "freedom" as we want. And this is easily remarkable in philosphers' and writers' opinions. For example:

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.  ~Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.  ~Charles Kingsley

None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. - Goethe 

And I could go on. It's even hard to find two people who have got the same idea of freedom in this world. 

But...
isn't this the real freedom? Freedom is to think of "freedom" the way we want to. To achieve what makes us happy, or what makes us unhappy, depending on what we want from our lives.
We are made up of chains, boundaries, burdens, what we are can be seen int hw way we struggle against oppression. 

Dying? Crying? Fighting? Protesting? Doing nothing?

This is it. People can be free even in their happiness, or laziness, and so on.

But I think nature is the greatest teacher of all. And I always think this way.
In South Italy, where I live, there are lots of birds, they can be called sparrows, but they're diffused especially in my land. There's something really curious with these birds: if one takes a newborn sparrow and puts it into a cage at home, the mom of the bird comes home to find her sparrow and feeds it with poisonous herb, to kill and save him from his prison. 
 
Life is our beatiful and lovely cage. (there's no sarcasm in this sentence)

Bye, dear :)
Written by: Uranus 

Friday, July 1, 2011

Julho. Jouillet


E é assim que Julho chega. Meio doente, meio fraco, meio desesperançoso.
É normal eu parar e perceber o quão meus dias são cheios e, ao mesmo tempo, tão vazios.
Há uma retomada em alguns objetivos.
Não consigo definir direito como foi o mês de Junho. Acho que nem os artigos de Junho podem definí-lo de forma satisfatória.
Às vezes, pergunto-me se minha memória me trairia a esse ponto. Às vezes, penso que é apenas uma overdose de informação.
Pra que serve o infortúnio ?
Como posso desacorrentar-me dos grilhões que fiz com tanto cuidado ?
Talvez a resposta não seja quebrar nenhuma ligação.
O sono, talvez seja hora de adormecer esse demônio.
Preciso de tempo pra regenerar.

Et c'est comme ça que Joullet il arrive. Un peu maladi, un peu faible, un peu sans des espérances.
C'est normal que moi je m'arrête pour voir comme mes jours ils sont pleins et, au même temps, si vides.
Il y a une reprise en des objectifs.
Je ne sais pas dire comment que ce mois de Juin me fut. Je crois que même les articles de ce mois-là ne vous pourront le dire d'une mannière satisfatoire.
Parfois, je me demande si ma mémoire me trahirait jusqu'à ce point-ci. Parfois, je pense que ça n'est que seulement un excés d'informations.
À quoi ça sert le malheur ?
Comment puis-je me desaccrocher des chaînes qui je fis avec toute ma tendresse ?
Peut-être, la réponse soit que je ne dois écraser aucune connexion.
Le sommeil,  peut-être ça soit l'heure de faire dormir ce démon.
Il faut du temps pour régénérer.