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…
As the year comes to a close we can look back upon lessons learned, or lessons we searched for –but really weren’t there. Best of all, time is time we spent with friends. Philosophy is not a solitary activity. Philosophy is a journey that is made in the company of others, much like the…
A few months ago I subscribed to the New York Times. I have no regrets. I receive the Sunday edition only. It suffices for a weeks worth of reading. A variety of subjects are treated in depth, with a purity and precision of language that rivals the best prose that I have read anywhere. …
Yesterday I attended a birthday party for our grandson. It was his forth birthday. He has a good grasp of language now and is able to express his opinions, his desires quite well. The excitement on his face was unmistakable. He had reason to anticipate this special occasion long before the guest arrived at…
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…
Late in the afternoon a almost-winter sun glowed pink through hazy clouds, I walked across the parking lot at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein. Earlier in the day while at Starbucks Dan asked me if I had seen the Road Rage street rod which had been taken to the SEMA show? Dan is a…
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…
We are engulfed in an immense ancient indifference that does not sleep or dream. Call it Nature if you will, though everything that is is natural— the lignite-bearing earth, the factory, a darkness taller than the sky. This out-of-doors that wins our release and temporary peace— not because it is pristine or pretty, but…
The years click by, one becomes older, and things get worse. Many would agree with this generalization of their experience. If one is unlucky it would be difficult to see life otherwise , beset with chronic medical issues, and subject to the indignities of medicare for treatment. Luck counts for a great deal in…
