The Tar Pit

(On tar pits)

Humans' understanding of the universe is terrifyingly limited. Yet from thermodynamics we know (or we think we know) that by the arrow of entropy nature tends to fall into a general state of disorder. This is the zeroth tar pit.

The first, second, third and so on up to the nth are most of the things, beasts, people and phenomena surrounding us, from the actual sticky thing to more metaphorical notions such as Kafka's perfect bureaucracy, or just the fat lady standing in front of you at the queue in the post office.

In the same category lies a tar pit uniquely attributable to man, that creature more widely (although more and more narrowly) known as Zōon Politikon. It, like the Boltzmann constant itself, is also difficult to grasp, but you might know it as that feeling which (naturally!) keeps you from aspiring to become more human. It is laziness; it is stagnation; it is tiredness, and it is ultimately death.

This blog, my, Lucian Mogoșanu's blog, describes its author's struggle through his own personal tar pit, as well as accounts and critiques of some of his times'. I hope I will have at least captured some of the more interesting ones, much to the amusement of future alien anthropologists.

The Tar Pit is an ever incomplete and thus necessarily flawed publication. After all, tar pits might not even be enumerable.