Stoic Philosopher-Slave We met late in the day to discuss Stoicism, that is, the sayings of Epictetus, an excerpt from his “Manual.” Nine of us were around the table, a sell-out crowd. The discussion was spirited, wide ranging. There is no respite from the issues of our time, pressing upon us. Epictetus, a slave,…
There’s a gentle rain outside. Trees show signs of emerging leaf. Everything that I can see seems to be waiting. Waiting for what? Life is a procession, one thing after another. Cause and effect… ad infinitum. The mind imposes the notion of delay, waiting as a holiday parade, the marching band has to march…
Every single day is paradoxically heaven and hell. My grand daughter cannot experience life in such terms because she is somewhere in the middle of her effort to acquire language. I have no doubt that as years pass, with experience, reading, pursuit of scholarship, she will understand that unalloyed moments of joy flicker and…
Tomorrow will be my birthday. I am still here. In the course of asking myself, “how the hell did I reach this time and place,” I cannot answer in fine detail. I have to think that shear accident, more than my share of luck has figured into the fact that I am within reach…
My mood, my internal weather is as somber as the morning sky. The news from Ukraine is of widespread shelling of neighborhoods, of a mother wounded by shrapnel in the face, as she covers her child to protect it from death in the air. There is news of thousands of civilians removed from Mariupol,…
The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol. The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel….
Met up with two friends this morning. Walking along the riverfront, in the presence of waterbirds congregating on the far bank, commenting on the old buildings, built by several generations before the present, the buildings rehabilitated, upgraded not only for our end use purposes, but a reminder that we are not the first to…
All revolutions are aesthetic… Taste is power, and power is politics… So taste has enormous power to shape history. If it makes your scalp tingle, it’s art. “Bad taste is real taste, and good taste is just the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Jazz exemplifies the possibly doomed experiment of being totally free, with…
Someone who knows me well took me to task this week on account of my contempt for capitalism. His complaint paraphrased, – “Do you mean to say the guy operating the corner grocery down the street is an avaricious, exploiting….etc.” He and I were not in a situation to discuss the matter at length,…
Writing about the death of someone I did not know, I took a short walk in the snowfall to think. There’s a purity about snow. I remembered white symbolizes death in Japan. Purity is erasure, a blank slate. Death is erasure of the filigreed world, that Baroque montage of shape, color and sound, the…
