Category: Autobiographical
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A Worthy Life’s Goal
To think as clearly as one can and as deeply as one can about as many ultimate issues as one can for as long as one can.
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Study Everything, Join Nothing
What does my masthead motto mean? I have been asked. One correspondent opined that it is "inhuman." Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy? It depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back I joined a neighbor and some of his…
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Philosophy’s My Passion . . .
. . . teaching a distraction.
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A Budding Thomist Seeks Advice
This from a reader: I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era. As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be…
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Of Blood and Blog
My daily labors in the blogosphere since 2004, impressive as they are to some, have garnered nary a word of encouragement, or the opposite, from any relative. In compensation, I have a big fat file folder of tributes from strangers. I suspect this is not unusual. The people we know we take for granted. Is it…
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The Tet Offensive Fifty Years Later
It was around the time of Tet that I received a letter from Uncle Sam ordering me to downtown Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical. I went, and flunked. Due to a birth defect I hear only out of my right ear. I was classified 1-Y, and that was later changed to 4-F. In any…
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Why a Journal?
I keep a journal to remember, but also to remind myself of how much I have forgotten. Related: Why Maintain a Journal?
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The Walls of Red Wing
A bum knee sent me to the hot tub yesterday afternoon for a long soak. There I struck up a conversation with a 20-year-old grandson of a neighbor. He hails from Minnesota like seemingly half of the people I meet here this time of year. "Which town?," I asked. "Red Wing" was the reply. And…
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Life and Thought
The tension between life and thought is a very old theme of mine, from the painfully intense youthful days when I read Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf and all the others. I rehearsed the theme once again the other night in the nocturnal twilight zone between deep sleep and wakefulness. Strange and exasperatingly elusive…
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A Little Road Trip . . .
. . . to Sedona, Arizona and back. Left early Friday, back at noon on Saturday. 338 miles round-trip from my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains by the leisurely and scenic route via Payson which avoids Phoenix and most of Interstate 17. Wifey read a paper, so we had posh digs at…
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Why Maintain a Journal?
It was 47 years ago today that I first began keeping a regular journal under the motto, nulla dies sine linea, no day without a line. Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals. When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is…
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Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed
If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.) Hefner's death reminds me of a true story from around 1981. This was before I was married.…
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My Wife
Other wives say to their men: "Why can't you be like so-and-so?" My wife regularly tells me that she's glad I'm not like so-and-so. Grateful wife, happy life. I bless the day I found her.
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Back to Blog: Plugged In and Posting
August is upon us and this philosophical gyrovagus settles down once again in his cyber-scriptorium for further adventures at the limits of intelligibility.