It will not do to say that every age has been like this, that man has always felt threatened and yet managed to survive. The point is precisely that every age is different: each time has been unique, both in what it promised and what it threatened; sometimes the catastrophe has occurred. Irrational Man…
Ah, Jake and Elwood, so nice to see you again! I happened upon The Blues Brothers Movie last night. A few years have passed since my last viewing of the iconic film. Jake and Elwood are ex-cons. Jake is picked up by his brother Elwood outside of Joliete prison. They visit the Catholic orphanage…
Retrieved my copy of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Colony. I periodically review it with fresh interest, as the years pass. Accrued life experience allows a richer and deeper interpretation of Bradford’s words. Yes, these were Englishmen, my ancestors by blood and by religious heritage. Their tale is similar to immigrant tales of our…
Canary no. 1 Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized —…
No, wait! For this story a title with more zip, more punch is needed. Here are some choices. I’ll let you the reader look these over and make a selection, after you have read the New York Times article. Y’all come on down! Winter comes early to Republican red-state-Texas Making promises you can’t keep…
“Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts…
Spent a troubled night, awakening at intervals. Dreams are unaccountable. The recurring dream included several lyric lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. Not an unpleasant dream for me, I like the song. The alarm sounded at 6AM. A few minutes later, hardly awake, I heard from NPR that Trump’s son-in-law is angling for a role…
Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the earth rotated around in sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that. He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy. Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary…
Yes, it’s a long tune, at 5 minutes. Did you notice the organ track, the musical pattern that opens and runs the entire length of the piece? Townsend was influenced by the philosophy of Meher Baba, Inayat Kahn, and composer Terry Riley. Townsend sought to replicate a theory of reality as harmonious, with the…
Some years ago I spent a few days by the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state. In the course of the hiking expeditions, two things came to mind over and over. The immense beauty of the surroundings was indescribable. The physical sensation of hazard, of the lethal consequences of a lapse in judgment, was…
