Bernard Beckett
Bernard Beckett
Bernard Beckettis a New Zealand writer of fiction for young adults. His work includes novels and plays. Beckett has taught Drama, Mathematics and English at a number of high schools in the Wellington Region, and is currently teaching students at Hutt Valley High School in Lower Hutt...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionWriter
simple views world
Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
men our-world different
Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. Its very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover Gods great plan.
action sometimes failing
Sometimes, even the very best course of action fails.
ideas brain way
I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kants idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, its an evolved machine that we carry with us.
host parasites
Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
hands feelings bleeding
I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.
memories routine time-passes
But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine; it loses its grip.
believe media names
The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.
knowledge
A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.
death dying ends
In the end, living is defined by dying.
ideas mind together
Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
fear people monsters
Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
indifference plague
Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?
ideas mind machines
The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.