Monday begins the procession to Thanksgiving day, Thursday of this week. Three and a half weeks hence we will celebrate Christmas day. it is impossible to avoid the insistence of (paid) purveyors of merriment, that this is the happiest time of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas are both religious holidays, with a veneer of…
Saturday morning at a crowded Starbucks. What is to be done? Concentrate, focus upon the task at hand? I mean, the search for words, to wait until sensations, the reciprocal response of the body to a world sparks thought, a response… This space, the remodeled corner of 3rd and State in Geneva expresses the…
It is Friday. In my working years, every week had a frontier. The near border was Monday, the starting line where one accelerates to “get ahead.” What in the name of sanity did the intention of “getting ahead” mean? The relativity of everything was unnoticed, I was enthralled with what I had written, my…
It is late November, a winter chill has arrived. The “wintery mix,” a covering of fine ice crystals and rain is a reminder that the tilt of the earth’s axis away from the sun means winter is sure. That is the truth. What is meant by winter can be counted upon, preparation ought to…
A voice whispers, the sound of my conscience, that I am no exception to this mad scenario. All will choose seduction over prosaic substance, if we have opportunity. We cannot help ourselves — but believe that “someone to lie to me” must also be “someone to watch over me”… Nations are deceived so often…
This passage personally resonates with me. In my working years as owner of a company, I knew day to day the discipline of assigning a value, in terms of what someone else would be willing to pay. Exchange value: dollars for service, the quid pro quo. Is this a fair assessment of what we’ve…
A feature of our time is media punditry. From MSNBC, to Fox, to Newsmax and unnumbered internet channels of influencers and opinion makers, to name just a few: Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, and Selena Gomez… The overarching horizon of communication companies is profit/loss capitalism. Competition is the rule and thus the appetite for content…
There is… a counterforce which continually reminds us that there is no exclusively moral-making morality, and that a morality which asserts itself to the exclusion of all other morality destroys too much sound strength and is too dearly bought by mankind. The non-conventional and deviating people, who are so often productive and inventive, must…
The mind begins to sweat soon enough when reading Nietzsche. He offers a style of thinking, and angle of view of world and of self which is uncomfortable, at first. Reading such philosophy is comparable to training in order to run a marathon. One does not just run 26.1 miles on a whim. One…
Nietzsche is interested in the ideal of the ancient Greeks, “all things in moderation.” The Greeks were as human as any 21st century homo sapien. Ideals serve as coordinates that we attempt to follow, albeit the inadequacy of our character, or skill, or resources. In contradistinction to the Greeks we Americans make no attempt…
