Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean really, really, honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the…
All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. —Balthasar Gracian So began our essay, Flavors of Time by Dean Buonomano. We awaken to consciousness upon birth, a consciousness that increases with the mastery of motor skills and then of language. Observe a child over the year…
I finished the essay on the subject of time. That’s my second read. And I’ll likely read it again. I’ve been intrigued with “time” for many years. I cannot help but notice that a great deal of poetry happens to be verses that meditate upon the difference that times passage makes in human consciousness…
How do I say this? On this Sunday afternoon the Superbowl spectacle is to be staged in Minneapolis. I find it hard to care. I am stuck back on groundhog day, February the 2nd. It was a sunny day, Punxsutawny Phil returned to his burrow and thus six more weeks of winter are in…
The link between excellence in parenting and a happy childhood is obvious. There are not many excellent parents. From my observation of families, and of my own experience a majority of us greet our newly born child as if we were Adam and Eve. I am sobered to acknowledge that most of us enter…
“He said once I am the single greatest president in his lifetime, now he’s a young man, so it’s not that much,” Trump told Congressional Republicans at their annual retreat in West Virginia. And apparently it wasn’t enough that the 83-year-old from Utah said that he was the best president in his lifetime. “He…
As planned I met with friends Tuesday evening for philosophy discussion. We considered the words of Seneca on the subject of friendship. The subject was apropos in our own time of political gridlock, when words seem to make little difference. Feeling is confused with thinking. Feelings are shifting sand, nothing upon which to forge…
It is Tuesday morning. The sun rises gloriously. The air is still and cold, about 13 degrees F. The President will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight. I will not be watching. I plan to be with friends sampling Scotch and philosophizing about an essay by Seneca on friendship. Friendship takes…
Dream not of Utopias but be content if the least thing go forward, and count the outcome of the thing at hand as a small thing. For who can alter another’s conviction? Failing to get a change of conviction, we merely get men pretending to be persuaded and chafing like slaves under coercion. —-Marcus…
What lessons can be taken away from the stories of the three Julio-Claudian emperors, the city-bred descendants of Augustus and Livia? The language is that of Will Durant. Durant writes “They began like Gabriel, and ended like Lucifer.” 1. When power devolves from being distributed between the legislative and the executive branch an unconstitutional…
