A friend sent me an article by David Brooks, published in the September issue of The Atlantic, How the Bobos Broke America Brooks uses his incisive analytical skills, a deft facility with language to outline the rise of the Creative Class to the apex of the pecking order of American influence, and a rising simmer…
I discovered another writer. Or did the work of Emil Cioran discovered me? There is the old saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.” E. M. Cioran was born Romanian. He left for Paris in the late 1930s. I purchased his second book published in French, entitled, All Gall Is Divided. …
THE DRY SALVAGES (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder…
I walked north along the Fox River trail from Batavia to Geneva yesterday. In my estimation this is not a long walk, about two miles round trip. I could not fail to notice how low the river is presently. Due to a lack of rain you could walk across the shallows bank to bank,…
I wonder if life would be better as a “lower” mammal, rather than as a human being? A non human mammal, without the facility of language would be equipped with efficient senses, better sight, hearing, smell along with instinct honed as a serrated blade. The mammal would not be burdened with the paradoxes of…
Could the second law of thermodynamics be the least abstract of all scientific principles? I am thinking of entropy, the arrow of time. Left to itself, a system, or a human being, or a city, a whole society, a solar system will reach a state of equilibrium. The principle was first formulated in 1824. Heat…
Many months ago it felt right to use “Plague Journal” in the title line for these posts. I assumed that fighting the virus would be a process, that the work of research with the public’s self-interested cooperation would reduce the corona virus to a minor inconvenience. A two year anniversary is approaching since our…
Uncultured mansees in conscience, in reason,so far as he recognizes it as his ownno universal objective power; therefore he must separate from himselfthat which gives him moral laws,and place it in opposition to himself,as a distinct personal being. Belief in revelationis a childlike belief,and is only respectable as long asit is childlike. — excerpt,…
How to begin. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary, of the September 11th, 2001 suicide attack on the twin towers in Manhattan, on the Pentagon, and the fourth passenger jet plowing into the earth at Shanksville Pennsylvania. Four occasions of mass death were memorialized yesterday by ceremonies at the sites where they occurred. I paid…
“‘Now if love is always for this,’ she proceeded, ‘what is the method of those who pursue it, and what is the behavior whose eagerness and straining are to be termed love? What actually is this effort? Can you tell me?’ “‘Ah, Diotima,’ I said; ‘in that case I should hardly be admiring you…
