Midweek, the sun shines, the usual frigid winter cold has moderated. A good day for a long walk, and lunch with a friend. What to write about as several things present themselves to mind today. First is the wonder of learning, no matter our circumstances, there are elements at hand to admire, recognize as…
A gray Tuesday, winter… Surely this must be the mid-west. Indeed, the Fox River Valley is west of Chicago. A typical winter’s pall has ascended, and homo sapiens are inclined toward hibernation. Never mind Chinese spy balloons, or an earthquake in Turkey, or a war grinding on between Russia and Ukraine, or commerce that…
Life— that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame —also everything that wounds us; we simply cannot do otherwise. –excerpt The Gay Science, Preface, §3 by Friedrich Nietzsche Last night I watched the Grammy Awards on CBS. I was indifferent to most of the two hour show. It…
Memory. How crucial, even sublime is the faculty of memory. In the pre-dawn I dreamed. I was back at my childhood home. Perhaps it was only a fragment, a sliver of sensation. I saw, or better expressed, felt that I was in the hallway of the old house where I grew up, living…
One kind of man will risk nothing, another wants risks. Are we others contemptuous of life? On the contrary, we instinctively seek life raised to a higher power, life lived in danger— but that, to repeat it, does not mean we want to be more virtuous than others. Pascal, for example, wanted to risk…
We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we…
You want if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that seems to us an end, a state that makes humanity ridiculous and contemptible —…
Monday morning, waking early before light, — couldn’t sleep. What can one do but adjust… I suppose the loss of anyone is a stand-alone experience, an uprooting, a sensation of gratitude and regret. Fuck… Al’s passing was timely in that his living years were full. I mean his stories “ran over,” as a glass…
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. –excerpt Do…
East Coker by T. S. Eliot III I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait…
