Couldn’t settle on an idea earlier in the day. I decided to just read. Sometime another’s words give birth to my own. To be human is not a given. It’s an achievement, a task of a life time, worthwhile but imperfectly accomplished. Old Heraclitus once observed that the majority never awaken to their opportunity/responsibility…
This morning according to the NPR newscast the President is to visit the border region between our country and Mexico. I visited that part of our country once, many years ago. Traveling from Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr the train stopped for about twenty minutes somewhere in New Mexico. I marveled…
Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly…
I was intrigued by these words from Heidegger. You will need to read carefully, and at least twice for his meaning to clarify for your mind. Written in the early years of the 20th century, the words are prescient to our condition a century into the future, the 21st century. By disavowing itself in…
The disclosedness of beings, which lets beings be, sets man free for his “freedom” by first offering to his choice something possible (a being) and by imposing on him something necessary (a being), human caprice does not then have freedom at its disposal. Man does not “possess” freedom as a property. At best, the…
At the end of the year Time Magazine selects a Person Of The Year. This time around Time chose a category of individual: the “guardians” for truth, that is four journalists who persisted in writing, in reporting truth at great cost to themselves, imprisonment and loss of their lives. One of the guardians for…
Ordinary people have to live their lives on an ordinary personal level; there are decencies and betrayals, judgments and perceptions which persist above or below whatever political circumstances exist or whatever social changes come into force. and these are the stuff of the ordinary moral life. ….because the everyday moral worldis a matter of…
Scientific existence possesses its simplicity and aptness in that it relates to beings themselves in a distinctive way and only to them. Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand. –*– Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on…
Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur. –excerpt…
There are two more days left in November. Then comes December the darkest month, which is also the coming of Christmas. Christmas is a festival of lights. Darkness and light. This morning I wish that I were a bear having found a warm place to hibernate until spring. But I am not a bear…
