stuartforsyth

Troll Bridge

I have lived next to this bridge as far back as I can remember and my time is nearly up. I have watched people come and go, moving over it and under it as my memory fades and becomes thin and scattered, like fireflies tossed in a summer breeze. Part of me still longs for those green tree-lined banks sloping down into the muddy brown waters; for a time when men still valued such things over their barren concrete worlds. I remember how young and hungry the night was in the long distant past; when even the naked painted men feared to cross the fallen trees at dusk. The finite allotment of time trickled so slowly back then, divvied up between all who lived in the world. Now there are so many hurrying to fit their lives into the billions of tiny shards that need to go around; each generation with so many more years and so much less time.

I have lived next to this bridge as far back as I can remember and my time is nearly up. It doesn’t make me sad anymore for I am a thing of the past, relegated now to fiction and children’s story books. Perhaps my apathy comes from the fading but I am at peace with that. If you stand very still on a quiet night and hold your breath between the rumble of the trains you may still hear me breathing or catch two pinpricks of light staring back at you.

I have lived next to this bridge as far back as I can remember and my time is nearly up … but not just yet.

~Stuart Forsyth

A revolution of thought; how AHA moments shape our lives.

There it is, a moment frozen in time when the rug gets pulled out from beneath your feet and fundamental thought processes are changed irrevocably once and for all.

Aha moment! Wake up world, we are well on course to a dystopian future once only thought to exist as fiction instagr.am/p/HFNxpjQ_jI/

— s2rt (@s2rt) February 16, 2012

I am re-reading George Orwell’s 1984 at the moment with the benefit of a few more years under my belt. There have been several slap-in-the-face moments where I can’t help but marvel how he seemed to understand the human condition well enough to create a dystopian vision that is relevant to the governments and societies of today. I offer up a few extracts, tit-bits to hold up to the world you have come to know, to draw your own conclusions against.

The first extract is the one used in the Instagram photo above:

Science and Technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

And here is another to hold up to the 1%

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society [is] only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

Or one for the continued drumming of fear at an event, though horrific and public, killed less people than die on the roads over a typical Easter weekend:

And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefor in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Perhaps it’s time once more for a revolution of thought. Perhaps this is what is embodied in the outrage sweeping the globe. The challenging of outdated modes of thought which no longer get pride of place simply due to the length of their tenure.