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by 1970-01-01 1048 days ago
This was worth the click

     A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to it through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says it is possible "but not now". The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man he only accepts them "so that you do not think you have left anything undone". The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain entry to the law, but waits at the doorway until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why, even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years he has been there. The doorkeeper answers, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it"
2 comments

Thus the last and always unuttered slogan of modernity: no lives matter.
Ha! Dark, comparatively, I like it.

Of course, this is also wrong. Just as "X lives matter"* is wrong.

I doubt there's any pithy slogan that quite captures the reality of "what matters"**. Best I can do, personally, is point you towards the type of person who might be able to ... coalesce the vapor ... in such a way as to possibly produce a momentarily renewed sense of enlightenment***:

https://youtu.be/tl4VD8uvgec

* For any given value of X

** That may seem kind of absurd and stupid, but, I'm serious - there is complexity to the topic in part simply because a given human (and likely beyond) can generate / experience / believe that some "X matters", and we ARE a (miniscule, in multiple ways) part of the universe

*** Left "timestamp" off so setting / framework of scene is more comprehensible, skip to ~33s for "the meat"

A good quote, but where did you see it?