I watched the 94th Academy Awards last night, a bit reluctantly. The Academy Awards show, as such shows go, become absurd in the bid to out-do themselves. Each year the aspiration is for more of a spectacle than anything done in the past. The need to produce “a show” to attract advertisers competes with…
“Even if you’re alone, you’re destined to do it…” Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, 46, the lead singer of Okean Elzy and perhaps Ukraine’s biggest star, was supposed to be preparing to play the band’s latest album to packed venues across the world from April… Since, he has sung in Odessa near the Duc de Richelieu monument…
Brain fog… At least that was my condition upon waking this morning. It is gray, windy, a day chilled with winter’s retreat. The disorientation, as if my senses were obstructed by a old exhausted filter, continued until I arrived at Starbucks. Now I am into my second cup of coffee. I watched the 1970…
My mood, my internal weather is as somber as the morning sky. The news from Ukraine is of widespread shelling of neighborhoods, of a mother wounded by shrapnel in the face, as she covers her child to protect it from death in the air. There is news of thousands of civilians removed from Mariupol,…
We live in through and by our stories do we not? Who could I possibly be apart from the stories that I tell myself? What could I become unless my imagination is sparked by the stories which you have told me? The ultimate form of human association is marked by vulnerability, – such that…
We began our discussion on the expansive subject of “love.” What can be said philosophically about love, or about “falling in love?” Love is a subject commanding enormous attention, as witnessed by innumerable novels, pop ballads, movies, and the Hallmark channel. “Falling in love” is a euphemism that is often overheard. The expression can…
The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol. The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel….
The first spring rain produced about an inch of rainfall. An inch is a good beginning. With another day of gentle rain, we will be off the starting-line of growing season. It sounds strange to say “we.” By habit we think of homo sapiens as distinct, abstract, essentially different from nature. That is a…
What does it take to become human, to bridge the gap between… zoe and bios, physiology and biography, nature and spirit, the somatic and symbolic? For us life is meaning and meaning is life. —Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt; Arendt’s Bearing on Kristeva’s Project by Noëlle McAfee, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy The…
There is a light rain falling. Rain began yesterday. I never complain about the rain. What I fear is drought depriving vegetation of nourishment in the growing season. Severe drought stresses mature trees, making older trees susceptible to disease. I feel kinship to trees. Trees provide shelter to a variety of mammals, birds, even…
