If you wish to join this network, you must provide an email address for the admins and answer the questions in the questionnaire in a way that shows us you're not a bot or spamkin. It has been customary in the past to allow bots and spamkin a little bit of rope to hang themselves with - but I'm tired of that now, and will just delete anything I don't like the looks of. Don't get sore at me over it, honeylamb - just answer the questions like a human being and, magically, you become Real. A string of monosyllabic cybergrunts = immediate and harsh justice. If you're here because you want to advertise wares, fucking rope us in with your charm, talent, and wit first.

The only people really at leisure are those who take time for philosophy. They alone really live. It is not their lifetime alone of which they are careful stewards: they annex every age to their own and exploit all the years that have gone before. Unless we prove ingrate, it was for us that the illustrious founders of divine schools of thought came into being, for us they prepared a way of life. By the exertions of others we are led to the fairest treasures, raised to the light out of the darkness in which they were mined. No age is forbidden us, we have admittance to all, and if we choose to transcend the narrow bounds of human frailty by loftiness of mind, there is a vast stretch of time for us to roam. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, transcend human nature with the Stoics, defy it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to participate in any age, why should we not betake ourselves in mind from this petty and ephemeral span to the boundless and timeless region we can share with our betters?...

In the meanwhile, while [people] are robbing and being robbed, while they disrupt each other's repose and make one another miserable, life remains without profit, without pleasure, without moral improvement. No one keeps death in view, everyone focuses on remote hopes. Some even make posthumous provisions --- massive sepulchres, dedications of public buildings, gladiatorial shows, and pretentious obsequies. But the funerals of such people should be conducted by torch and taper light, as though they had in fact died in childhood.

~Lucius Annaeus Seneca


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