Saturday 11:35 AM is quite late for me to be writing here at Starbucks. But who cares? I will not care as long as I come up with some good words. I awakened at 6AM in order to be present on the sidelines to observe and cheer a grandson play his final soccer game…
I awakened a few minutes ahead of the alarm. Sometimes that happens. That part of me which eludes words, wanted to be conscious, awake/alive… Thus began my day. On my way to Starbucks, I could sense that Friday will be warm, a return of comfortable weather, prior to the certain advent of frost, and…
It [laughter] burns as it comes into contact with death; from the symbols of the emptiness of death it draws a heightened consciousness of being. …It brings us out, for a time, from the impasse in which life is enclosed by those whose only concern is to preserve it. …those arts which sustain anguish…
Often I have something in mind to write about. I read. Thoughts conveyed by others often imperfectly understood, capture my imagination. I feel a compulsion to write something, because instinct says an insight important for the future is worthy of exploration. We are “in this thing called life,” together are we not? It is…
I remember writing about this tune in the past. The musical score and lyric of certain songs strike me as iconic, as emblematic of a time, a quest for what it means to be human in a certain “world.” The lyric lines, the blend of the voices convey the friction and effort of discovering…
The crisis of ’29, which was a real catastrophe, cannot happen again today. It has been supplanted by a perpetual simulation of crisis. Unlike a society’s heroic or intrinsic values, the simulated, synthetic values (see Reagan) that have taken their place no longer threaten to collapse. Their own weight no long threatens to result…
More from Friedrich Nietzsche… To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. But you can be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, “Epigrams and Maxims,” Section 3 Philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of…
The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact, nothing is identical with anything else. -Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” Section 19 Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a…
Is it not the case that similar problems, analogous issues present themselves over and over, such as is suggested by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, Circles? Emerson wrote in his unforgettable way that life is composed of concentric circles, intersecting matters of concern, of compelling interest. Fresh to my consciousness is an email…
Got off to a late start this morning… I arrived at Starbucks and found a place seated against the wall, the small table holding the computer and a book, The space in between where I am seated and the counter behind which the baristas work, has been a whirl of activity for the past…
