Yesterday I raked leaves, a task to be done over and over. Tedium. Leaves do not fall all at once, raking is not a task “one and done.” The work is recurrent. When one session is finished it is replaced by another. Raking, I heard many voices, the sound of approaching running feet. Upon…
I’ve not concealed my love for Rock N Roll, that music of the people, admittedly a cultural feature of my generation. Nietzsche said that life would hardly be worth living without music. “Without music, life would be a mistake.. I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.” This song fills…
It is time for some wild dancing, some ecstasy is it not? We approach election day for the mid-terms, a great deal is at stake and it will be impossible to know the stakes until the results are in. Our prime directive is “survival” is it not? Therefore I offer this tune by…
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…
