Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment will be all the greater. Or as one of my aphorisms has it:
Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.
Omnia vanitas, saith the Preacher of Ecclesiastes.
But if all is vain, so too is the taking note of it; whence one might reasonably conclude that all is not vain.
Vanity is not the last word. It is the penultimate word.
It is sweet to do nothing, but only if if the inactivity comes like the caesura in a line of poetry or the punctuation in a sentence of prose or the rest in a piece of music. Inactivity extended stultifies.
Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there. Philosophers especially should want to live long so as to study life from all temporal angles.
We become cold and hard to survive in a world cold and hard, one not of our making, thereby contributing to the coldness and hardness from which we set out to protect ourselves. And so, paradoxically, the world is of our making.
The world's too shallow a pond to justify one's wanting to make a splash in it.
Some of us from modest origins will end up with more money than we will ever need or be able to spend. The wages of our frugality will not be spent by us but passed on to benefit others. We credit our success to the old-time virtues. We understand that poverty is more a lack of virtue than a lack of money.
But to suggest that blacks could profit from these old-school virtues will get us branded as 'racists.' Apparently, to the mind of a leftist, a black who can defer gratification is like a black conservative, a 'traitor' to his race, as if race is a political construct.
Such is the real racism of low expectations fueled by 'progressive' reality denial according to which race is a socio-political construct.
If we were as charitable to our fellows when they were alive as we are when we write their obituaries — the world would be better for our dissembling.
Is a presidential pardon an act of mercy? If it is, then it cannot be said to be just or unjust.
It is fitting that infatuation is fleeting.
The study of logic is profitable only to those who don't need it.
A crude adage has it that virgins are wasted on the young. The same could be said of philosophy.
Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many case a mere self-indulgence.
Some are of propinquity, others of affinity. The best are both.
To use 'educate' in place of 'inform' shows a lack of education.