Прекрасное руководство по жизни играючи – “Finite and Infinite Games” от James P. Carse.
Английский стоит учить хотя бы потому, что этой книги, похоже что, на русском просто нет.
1. There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of
continuing the play.
2. There is no game, finite or infinite, unless the players freely agree to play it. No one can
play who is forced to play. This is an invariable principle of all play. Whoever must play,
cannot play.
6. Other than the principle of voluntarism, infinite games are the opposite of finite games in
every way. Infinite games have no spatial, temporal, or numerical boundaries, and no
winners or rankings. Finite games are externally defined; infinite games are internally
defined. The time of an infinite game is determined in the game itself.
Соответственно, внешнее – конечно, внутреннее – бесконечно.
За чем гоняться – решать вам.
14. To be playful is not to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. When we are playful
with each other we relate as free persons; everything that happens is of consequence. In
fact, it is being serious that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is the dread of the
unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified
conclusion; to be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.
17. Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players
do not regard the past as determining the present/future, they have no way of knowing
what has begun in the past. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning.
Inasmuch as the present/future is always surprising, the past is always changing.
51. …As the genius of your words, you lose all authority over them. So too with
thoughts. However you consider them your own, you cannot think the thoughts
themselves, but only what they are about.
…To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to
leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does not have a mind full of
thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision.
…This does not mean that I can see what you see. On the contrary, it is because I
cannot see what you see that I can see at all. The discovery that you are the unrepeatable
center of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I am
the center of my own.
68. The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite
play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time
viewed.
As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time
of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality.
Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.
Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an
event that gives the time within it its specific quality. For an infinite player there
is not such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of
grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.
An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of
time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite
player’s way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a
way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future,
but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.
Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed in their work or love
or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it. They are not concerned
to determine when it is over, but only what comes of it.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to
be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to
have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into
play.