How do I begin? We are several days on the far side of Labor Day. In this election year, November 4th is coming up fast (like a sweeping curve at the end of a racetrack straightaway). We, that is fellow citizens, will soon cast a ballot to select the 47th president of the United…
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…
The uncomfortable, suffocating heat and humidity have moved on. Today is bright with sunlight, and agreeably mild. “So it goes” with the weather and with life. It pays to pay attention to what is on the menu, to the “soup of the day” or to the Duck à l’Orange if it happens as the…
Just finished reading an essay, Attuned to the Aesthetic by Tom Cochrane. The author proposed, suggested that beauty is a ground for morality. I did enjoy the essay, not simply because I also endorse his thesis, but because the seven pages were beautifully written, a smooth read. Could we say that to be involved…
To write something, anything at all is only one reason for starting the day at Starbucks. Perhaps a good conversation will be possible? Wednesday is a day of good fortune since I have benefited from a good chat with Doug, as well as prospect of reflecting upon some aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil. …
To love humanity for the sake of God – that has been the noblest and most bizarre feeling people have attained so far. That the love of humanity, in the absence of any sanctifying ulterior motive, is one more stupidity and abomination; that the tendency to love humanity like this can only get its…
How inevitable every detail of my life has been, how channeled by prior events, some partially understood, most just opaque happenings that appear dumb, still no less impactful upon my life. Fortune and misfortune are how I would label the entire saga. I know that with some effort I could construct a list of…
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman —a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is…
A question without an answer; the will for man and the earth is lacking; behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse which hitherto lay over mankind… Any meaning is better than no meaning at all. From…
The ear, the organ of fear, could not have evolved so greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the…
