{"id":1921,"date":"2007-04-26T12:45:34","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T19:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2007\/04\/26\/that-blade-pressed\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:40:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:40:29","slug":"that-blade-pressed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2007\/04\/26\/that-blade-pressed\/","title":{"rendered":"That Blade Pressed"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>God is a filter, a polaroid lens that blanks out all the wild colors and fabulous detail of nature. God obliterates randomness. God kills luck. God turns sharp-edged struggle into a tiresome parable. He&#8217;s the all-purpose explanation, the always-available excuse. He&#8217;s a big shrug of the shoulders, a cosmic palms-up gesture, a rabbit&#8217;s foot, a dodge, a shot of morphine, a handful of Prozac. He&#8217;s beige. He&#8217;s boring, and he makes people boring and life boring.<\/p>\n<p>Life is real. Nature is real. Death is real. It&#8217;s not shadows on a wall, it&#8217;s not an illusion or a test or a phase we pass through. Life is dangerous and exciting and that blade pressed against jugular isn&#8217;t a ticket to paradise it&#8217;s the real threat of the real end. And when you accept that, when you accept that you&#8217;re playing the game with real money, life gets so much more interesting.<\/p>\n<p>God smooths the rough edges. I don&#8217;t want the edges smoothed. <\/p>\n<p>&#8212; M. Takhallus, <a href=\"http:\/\/sidewaysmencken.blogspot.com\/\">Sideways Mencken<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Thanks to Euan at <a href=\"http:\/\/theobvious.typepad.com\/blog\/\">The Obvious?<\/a> for pointing out this quote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>God is a filter, a polaroid lens that blanks out all the wild colors and fabulous detail of nature. God obliterates randomness. God kills luck. God turns sharp-edged struggle into a tiresome parable. He&#8217;s the all-purpose explanation, the always-available excuse. He&#8217;s a big shrug of the shoulders, a cosmic palms-up gesture, a rabbit&#8217;s foot, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,16,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","category-nature","category-quotes"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12185,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921\/revisions\/12185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}