Awakened this morning in a foul mood. Can’t blame the low blood sugar because breakfast didn’t help my attitude. I attempted listening to NPR, feeling more troubled, enraged by an interview with an elected member of Congress from Oklahoma. The man smug and self-righteous, asserted that he would cast his vote to support the…
I received a note from a friend yesterday. He expressed a cautionary word about my interest in reading Nietzsche, about sliding from a productive skepticism into a grim cynicism. Nietzsche is not everyone’s cup of tea. His writings skirt the edge of madness. In the final months of his life he did suffer from…
Yesterday I listened to an interview with Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend Indiana. He is 37 years old, served a tour in Afghanistan, is a Rhodes scholar and is running for President. He won his 2nd term of Mayor with 80% of the vote. Mayor Pete comes across as likeable. His self confidence…
What child would not have cause to weep over its parents? Worthy I deemed this man and ripe for the sense of the earth; but when I saw his wife, the earth seemed to me a house for the senseless….. This one went out like a hero in quests for truths, and eventually he…
There is only one world, and this is false, cruel, and contradictory, seductive, without meaning— A world thus constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this “truth,” that is in order to live. –excerpt The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche Can’t shake this brief quotation. …
It is impossible to ignore, to reduce to a disposable abstraction one’s relationship to the Earth. We are of Nature, and with all that lives, will return to the living earth, from which we came. There was a time before we were, even if I seldom feel that fact. There will be a time…
Yesterday I didn’t post. Regret that I was defeated by circumstances. Defeat always occurs in the mind. External circumstances, in my case a disabled snow blower, projects awaiting my attention at work, etc. in concert constituted a mental squall, and I lost my heading. Writing is a discipline that serves to clarify a direction…
The snow falls this morning in a steady curtain. Vehicles, one by one speed by in a swirling wake of icy turbulence. Another morning in wintry Illinois. There is inevitable friction, turbulence, a rift between the world of human artifice called “civilization” and Nature. From the beginning of humankind, the awakening of consciousness by…
Starbucks on a Saturday morning, a background buzz of conversation, hubub from behind the serving counter, as baristas furiously compose drinks, microwaving breakfast treats, –and I reading my new book, Hiking With Nietzsche, by John Kaag. What am I thinking, as I close in on my 70th birthday, day to day working through the…
The weather is bitter, matching my frame of mind. Yesterday was close to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and over night, a whipsaw to 8 degrees and a stiff wind. Even colder existentially was the snippet of a NPR news report this morning. There is planned for today a White House Rose Garden ceremony where the…
