The State begins when groups naturally divided find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed groups. Before all the State is a plan of action and a program of collaboration. The men [and women]…
Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. …in these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths… All imperatives, all commands, are in a state of suspension. Given over…
…we are unable to have directly complete knowledge of reality, there is nothing for us but arbitrarily to construct a reality, to suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion. This provides us with an outline, a concept or framework of concepts. With this, as through a “sight,” we then look at the…
Today violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric, where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the…
In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized … It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities. …but without them, humanity…
Sunday, the backward look… Yesterday was delightful. On a Sunday, we give ourselves permission to reflect, to consider in the course of a walk in late summer, the perfection of Nature’s effulgence in plant life. After breakfast in Geneva we walked down 3rd Street. We admired the elephant’s ear leaves, purple, green and…
This morning I was moved by the description in the New York Times of the hundreds of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol in Washington. This from the Times: If someone is being criminally prosecuted, there’s often some dysfunction in their past. But I’ve been struck by…
What is that? How often have you asked yourself? Can you remember the last time you wandered around your backyard with no chore in mind, noticing the strange, seeing something beautiful as if for the first time? True confession, — I seldom do just that. On the other hand my grand daughter of two…
Fracture Ellen Bass When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a…
What is it about machinery, the proximity of forged, of cast metal, that combination of fire and steel of a machine that has shaped the male psyche of my generation? Will I always fail to do justice to the attraction of the symmetry, the “magic” of artifice, — which strikes home to the male…
