These lines are counter intuitive to the contemporary American scale of values. Democracy valorizes what is common, the equality of citizenship. I think this is a critical dimension, to be defended – at the level of political participation in our society. By universal agreement every citizen has a voice, in the form of a…
The college football season begins. Following an afternoon of immersion in drag racing at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Wisconsin, I resigned myself to indifferently watching the game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame on channel 7. The commentators ballyhoo’d the start of the season, which features televised games in state-of-the-art stadiums viewed by millions,…
These are severe, almost serrated words. The writer observes how profoundly we are marked, shaped by attitudes, habitual behaviors of our immediate, even of ancestors not proximate to our memory. I hardly knew my grandfather. Nevertheless what he loved lives and and is expressed in me. This endowment, a tendency for benefit or for…
An important feature of Nietzsche’s thought is a cultivated intuition of a gradation, of a hierarchy from the base, common, mundane to the transcendent. A scale of values is a capacity for recognition of the sacred. Nietzsche seldom wrote any approving estimation of European Christendom. Here, he acknowledges that “the book” of Christianity has…
A friend pointed me to this poem by Wm. Blake. How important is friendship, a few associations that are mutually cultivated for years, over an arc of time. I owe my growth as an adult to the recommendations received from friends, the books, poems, film, – all of that, the deposits in the bank…
Wednesday, is midweek. The suffocating, dangerous heat dome prevailing upon outdoor activity for the last day or so has receded. It is possible to move about again, to enjoy the most basic of our animal-like freedoms, that of movement. How about a story? This story of New York’s MTA, of a city public transit…
Still pondering the car show. I recall the blue Lamborghini parked near the entrance to the show, at the intersection of State and 3rd. Ferrari is widely recognized as an uncommon instance of excellence, the high art of the automobile. Lamborghini is even more so, and one might argue the apex of a tradition…
Car show yesterday. An adventure in memory. Big shows seem to trigger introspection. I think about the individuals in the prime of life, that solved mechanical conundrums, understanding more deeply the principles of physics, to design, to construct a more functional, and a more beautiful vehicle. I do not believe that beauty can be…
Car show weekend in Geneva. Today, Sunday is the big show, the Geneva concurs d’elegance. Both sides of 3rd as well as side streets are parked with exotic collector cars and race cars of all vintages. This is an annual event. Sure it’s testosterone laced, a fashion show of shaped metal, painted, polished to…
At times one feels compelled to venture out on thin ice. The term is used as metaphor to capture the hazard that attends to speaking the absurd, or on the other hand, speaking truth from which one’s fellows are conditioned to turn away. Equality is bedrock to the American experiment, to these United States….
