Took a walk yesterday; a mid-winter warmup, the sidewalk was melted clear of ice. Walking past Almond Marsh I felt sad, resonating with the gray sky, the muted brown of the decaying cattails. The melt water was a sheen of reflected light upon an ice covered marsh. The world before me appeared ethereal drained…
“Moments are torn from us,” Seneca wrote. “The whole future lies in uncertainty.” Fortune behaves as she pleases, he wrote. As we’ve talked about before, life comes at you fast. It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t reason, it doesn’t care about your wants or needs—it just is. All we can do is accept the uncertainty…
Where would I be without a few good friends, without my family? To imagine how different my life could be, I would have never known about books which have changed my life. There’s music which has transformed by sense of self, my being in the world, that I would never discover without a recommendation….
A child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is more movingor that [she] has more of a right to happiness than the others:it is that [she] is the living affirmation of human transcendence;[she] is on the watch, she is an eager hand held out to the world,[she] is a hope,…
I am not a fan of Heavy Metal music. That would be an understatement. If offered free tickets I would not attend a concert. However I have friends who are fans of Heavy Metal. There’s something about a song, or a band, or a composer that resonates with a chord in one’s own soul. …
Early morning, I left the house, the sun was a fiery ball at the tree line across a frozen river. The vehicle temperature gauge read +2 degrees. A song was playing on the local radio station. I am certain the poets, lyricists, playwrights, are the ones who show us the metaphors, perform the scenes…
For Homo Sapiens to live is to be aware of loss. I doubt that is the case for any other mammal. Language, the ability to think and to communicate with symbols allows us to contemplate time in the abstract, with memory of a past, and an imagined future. We are unable to live solely…
Choice/Responsibility and Fate/Doing What Your Daddy Done The trick it seems when it comes to philosophy is to make sense of a coincidence of opposites. On the one hand, is our intuitive sense of choice, that decisions are pivot points with consequences for which we blame ourselves (and others) or believe to be praiseworthy. …
I took a walk yesterday. A gray day, mid-January with a brisk breeze and thirty degrees. I walked 3rd Street in Geneva, the mind stimulated by visual and tactile sensation, — as I passed by restaurants “coming to life” in early afternoon. Reaching State Street, intending to purchase another cup of coffee from the…
I just finished reading The Phaedo written by Plato. The Phaedo, is a story that receives its title from the name of a friend of Socrates who is observer and auditor of the last hours of Socrates’ life. The last hours are spent in philosophical exchange with a circle of friends. Plato, a playwright…
