Category: Human Predicament
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Moral Progress
It is a sign of moral progress when, considering one's peccadilloes, one begins to wonder about the appropriateness of the diminutive suffix.
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Thinking Concretely About Death
When my death seems 'acceptable,' a 'natural' occurrence, I wonder whether I am thinking about it concretely and honestly enough. I wonder whether I am really confronting my own utter destruction as a subject for whom there is a world, as opposed to myself as an object in the world. If I view myself…
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From Slime to Subjectivity
When we procreate we cause not only the existence of more animals, but also of more points of view, with each new subject the center of its own world. Whether this is good or bad, it is certainly amazing! Copulation as world-making.
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Homo Homini Lupus
A 28-year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets. The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man. …
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Journeys and Preparations
We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return? "Because it is a journey into sheer…
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Agenda Fetishism
You know you're list-obsessive when, having completed a task, you add an entry to your 'to do' list just so you can cross it off. ………………… Agenda is the plural of agendum, something to be done. The infinitive form of the corresponding verb is agere, to do. Age quod agis is a well-known saying which…
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Prudential Anti-Natalism
Karl White writes: If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging…
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Old Mountaineers and Bold Mountaineers
I'm no climber, but I love walking in the mountains. On a solo backpacking adventure in the magnificent Sierra Nevada some years back I overheard a snatch of conversation: There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers. Ueli Steck, the great Swiss climber, is dead at 40,…
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Why Do You Carry a Notebook?
If I am wearing a shirt with pockets, I almost always carry a 3 X 5 notebook and a pen in my top left pocket. People sometimes ask why I carry it. I have a prepared response: It's in case I get a good idea. Haven't had one yet, but you never know. And if…
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Be Neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois
The barfly and the gambler, the flâneur and the floozy, fritter away their time. And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois. But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's dissipation, are equally time-wasting. Prayer, meditation, study…
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Obscure and Grateful
We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it. It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken for an ordinary schlep. A little recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs. Fame can be a curse. The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against…
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Dolce far Niente
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. At least this is true here below. Genesis 3:19 may be read as 'sentencing' us…
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Intellect, Emotion, Projection
It takes intellect to discern that people are dominated by their emotions, but the intellectual who is capable of understanding this is often prevented from understanding it by his tendency to project his intellectuality into others. We often have a hard time appreciating that others are not like us and do not value what we…
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Poverty and Plenty
Material plenty allows the leisure to contemplate one's moral and intellectual and spiritual poverty. So money, far from being the root of all evil, is often conducive, and sometimes necessary, for the uprooting of some evils. Related: Radix Omnium Malorum. This is one of my best entries. It definitively refutes the widespread notion that money…
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A Game I Play
I flip on a sit-com. Then I count the seconds before the onset of sexual innuendo, allusions, and the like. We are concupiscent from the ground up. And this by (fallen) nature. Our natural condition is exacerbated by the sex saturation of contemporary society. I played my game most recently the other night when…