Thomas the Barnes & Noble Engine

The local Barnes & Noble has a Thomas the Tank Engine railway set that is infamous in its popularity. Kids come from all around - how is it put in the Gospel of Mark: "And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out..." (1.5) - that's how it is. Kara loves to go to Barnes & Noble and play with this play set, and, so, I took her today. We joined dozens of other children knotted about the table, surrounded in a ring of parents who were, themselves, reading magazines and other books. I, myself, joined their number, grabbing a copy of Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory and settling down cross-legged before a rack of junior readers. Kara always has a good time. She is so polite, introducing herself by name to other children and sharing. I was so proud of her today, she played so well with so many different "kinds" of children. There is the helpful older girl, the shy same-age girl, the bratty younger boy, the violent older boy, the spaced out boy. Call it a watering hole for the local kindergemeinde. We were there for a good two hours today, giving Lynn-nore and Joanna time to nap. As for me, I'm just about to begin an assault on Heidegger's Being & Time. All part of trying to flesh out this new direction I've been mentioning.

To Bergson and Heidegger, I must add the french philosopher, Jean Baudrillard /bow-ree-ARD/. A number of his essays are on the web. There is a knot, a cord, that ties the work of these men to everything else: to Barth, Moltmann and Augustine. That cord is the self and memory.

First, from Baudrillard:

"It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence. There is no necessity to that. No matter what, our consciousness is never the echo of our own reality, of an existence set in "real time." But, rather, it is its echo in "delayed time," ... only in our sleep, our unconscious, and our death are we identical to ourselves."

And Michael Gelven writes in A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being And Time":

"...we could describe the problem of Being and Time as a phenomenological description of the transcendental [real] self. This means that it describes that first order of our consciousness by which we are made aware of ourselves as the free and determining factor in our own existence and in our comprehension of the external world."(3)