Over the past few days I have discussed with two good friends Nietzsche’s notion of the Superman. Both friends, who are extraordinarily well informed, were of the opinion that the hypothetical, infamous individual proposed by the German philosopher was an ego-driven, imperious, and intoxicated with will-to-power. I disagreed with their opinion though such a…
Friday was the anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Center, – twin office towers in Manhattan, struck by two hijacked commercial airliners. The event occurred twenty five years ago. We ought to cease lying to ourselves about the overarching context of the attack. What other than a response to America’s empire, could…
Today is September 11. Every form of media makes reference to the event in Manhattan occurring 25 years ago. It’s unremarkable that memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center reveal many meanings. There is no univocal, “correct” meaning. Many people died on that day, and the carnage was not limited to a…
What is most thought-provoking, then, could be something lofty, perhaps even the highest thing there is for man, provided man still is the being who is insofar as he thinks, thinks in that thought appeals to him because his essential nature consists in memory, the gathering of thought. And what is most thought-provoking —…
Today I am reading, while “leaning in” to process What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is difficult. At the beginning of the year I signed up with an online book club with two objectives in mind. I desired a virtual “community” of motivated adults to serve as a current of momentum to…
Lives unfold, shake out, become a revelation, or become a cul de sac in the course of time. What is time? I have read various theories of time. Our dilemma, we find ourselves inside of time, caught in times’ flow, we have no vantage point outside of entanglement in the flow of things. Theories…
It is Labor Day Monday. I spent Saturday at Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove Wisconsin. Two lanes of asphalt, stretch for a half mile that allows two race cars maximum acceleration for a quarter mile, then another 1,320 feet of room to slow the vehicles. That’s drag racing, a type of competition originating…
I am almost finished the Mumford book of over 400 pages. Lewis Mumford has a way-with-words to stoke my imagination. So I push ahead to read his account of the reciprocal influence of machines and society from the middle ages, about 1000 AD to the early 20th century. The quoted lines highlight the pivot…
Friday afternoon. I took the malaise of today to a meeting this morning. One does what one must, feelings aside. To this felt heaviness, as if gravity were double or tripled, even thinking moved as if in molasses, – perhaps you also find it impossible be certain of the cause(s) of such a funk?…
At sixteen I discovered drag racing. Performance engines built for extremes, they seemed magic to me. And that sound continues to have the effect for me. I remember the sound of those engines, – a Super Stock Plymouth, an A/FX Ford Mustang being tuned in the pits under the pine trees in North Carolina….
