What starts out as legitimate grooming and hygiene ends up as vanity.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
Halcyon Arizona October
Chilly nights, good for sleeping with windows open, warm dry days of lambent desert light. October's sad paradise passes too soon but its dying light ushers in the month of Gratitude in my personal liturgy. The 28th already. Savor each day, each moment, each sunrise and moonset, moonrise and sunset. Drink green tea in the gloaming with Kerouac on your knee.
Enjoy each thing as if for the first time — and the last.
Under the Aspect of Temporality
What doesn't matter under the aspect of eternity may well matter under the aspect of temporality. Which aspect trumps which, if either trumps either, is a problem, one more to add to the list of riddles that charm and seduce the philosopher.
Society and Solitude
Individuals need society to socialize them and raise them from the plane of mere animality. The quality of society, however, depends on true individuals, who are made by solitude. Moses was alone on Mt. Sinai; Jesus was forty days in the desert; alone Socrates communed with his daimon; Siddartha forsook the company of the royal compound; Henry "I have no walks to throw away on company" Thoreau went for walks solo. . . .
Thus society profits from its solitaries, assuming that those who escape from it for their own good return to it for its own good. In a Platonic figure, the escape from the Cave ought to be followed by a return to the Cave.
Brevity
Brevity is the soul of blog.
The Conservative Philosopher
As a philosopher, he loves reason. As a conservative, he is properly skeptical of it.
Escribitionism
Literary Exhibitionism.
Beguilement
The Russian prelest means 'beguilement.' It is indeed a beguiling world. The four chief beguilers: sex, money, power, fame. In their grip a man finds this empty and ephemeral world a veritable plenum of reality.
Religions and Languages
Religions are like languages: If you know only your own, then you don't truly know it.
Spirit and Existence
Spirit in us is as elusive as existence in things.
Tenets
Tenets tend not to be held tentatively, as mostly they should be.
The Infirmity of Reason
It is indicative of the infirmity of reason that one cannot prove the infirmity of reason. A faculty so weak that it must remain in doubt about its own strength and weakness.
The Midas Touch
Whatever King Midas touched turned into gold. The philosophers have something akin to it: whatever they touch turns into a puzzle. (I borrow the thought from Wilfrid Sellars.)
Emergentism
Here is a measly hunk of frangible bone and flesh out of which emerges a balloon so vast as to encompass the universe past, present, and future. And then one day the wretched little animal dies, the air supply is cut off, and the balloon collapses, its last thought being: what the hell was that all about?
Life’s Parade
We need those who march in the parade, but we also need those who merely observe and ask where it is going.