Feeling empty this morning. What is to be said/written? The coffee is hot and astringent. The traffic outside the front window at Starbucks rushes by upon it’s metaled ways. There’s the look of rain in the gray clouds. Time will tell how much we will receive. Hot, dry weather has persisted. Vegetation is thirsty…
It is Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. My mind is in a fog, and I have no desire to catch up on the morning’s news. The sun streams from the east over the Fox River and it stands to be another warm day. It is not yet astronomical Fall, the season of summer…
Today is Labor Day. Monday a day of respite from work. Work is the joint enterprise to sustain ourselves, to build shelter, cultivate, to transport, to prepare food. Also, work is essential to fashion a place of safety, a refuge that is “home.” I am reading Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I…
“It was a scene,” he told Playboy magazine. “Everyone went out and applauded the sunset every night. Bales of marijuana washed up on the shore. There were great cheap Cuban restaurants … Key West seemed like the End: East Coast Division — a common reason people wind up there, especially writers, artists, musicians and…
What is happiness? By what means do we know if we are happy? It seems that only in retrospect I judge myself to have been happy. My grand daughter is almost four years old. She appears to be as happy as is humanly possible when I push her high in a swing. While swinging…
This strange poem resonates with me. Nietzsche was in a class by himself as a professional intellectual. The youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24, he later turned to philosophy. Nietzsche was an incessant writer. He was plagued with health problems. Also,…
“Souls that are unsure” Souls that are unsure and cloying I loathe like their acclaim. All their honors are annoying, All their praise is self-hatred and shame. Since I do not join their dances, Tied to their old rope, I am followed by their glances’ Sweetly poisoned envy without hope. Let them curse me…
The concluding appendix of The Gay Science is a collection of poems. The section is entitled Songs of Prince Bird-free, or “free as a bird.” The German term signifies an outlaw whom anyone can shoot on sight. The reader of The Gay Science likely would not be surprised at the ambiguity of the title. …
I felt ambivalence. Not being a connoisseur of antique automobiles why would I desire the press of congestion at the Geneva Concours d’Elegance? Contemplating vintage vehicles on the flat screen in the course of a television historical drama is enough for me. On the other hand, the event was free… As you would guess…
Another poem from the concluding appendix to The Gay Science. I like the sardonic note of this one, a surreal description of a professional religionist, of a man-of-the-cloth. Beppa is the pious priest, the first to benefit from forgiveness-at-a-discount offered by the church. “With another sin, one wipes old sins away.” Another phrasing that…
