Category: Human Predicament
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Measurement by Regrets
We are measurable by the nature of our regrets. What do you regret? Not having drunk enough good wine? Not having amassed more wealth? Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places? Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?…
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Delicious Obscurity
We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it. It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken, and left, for an average 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…
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What It Takes to Appreciate Nature
Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage setting for what they take to be the really real, the social…
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Compensation for Decline
I tune in to CNN and hear about some academic who is taking a conspiracy line on the Sandy Hook massacre. Deplorable, but in compensation there is the fascination of watching one's country unravel. We owls of Minerva may not welcome the onset of dusk, but it is the time when we spread our wings. …
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Dalrymple on Inhumanity
Here. Excerpt: Nevertheless, no one could read this book [Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross] without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency…
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On Being 26 Rather Than 62
W. K. writes, You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope.…
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How Did We Get to be So Proud?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." So inauspicious a…
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A School of Humility?
Perhaps we are here to be taught humility. Some indications that this could be so: 1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it. A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity. …
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On Socializing
He who avoids socializing avoids pointless conversations, some of which are worse than pointless. For example, chatting with a stranger can turn ugly very quickly if it happens that you differ politically. Still, socializing is not all bad. Like whisky, a little is good now and again. But more is not better. Related articles Propinquity and…
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Be Gracious
Does someone want to do something for you? Buy you lunch? Give you a gift? Bring something to the dinner? Be gracious. Don't say, "You don't have to buy me lunch," or "Let me buy you lunch," or "You didn't have to bring that." Humbly accept and grant the donor the pleasure of being a…
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The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen’s Remains Found
The Superstitions are not called the Killer Mountains for nothing. Many a man has been lured to his death in this rugged wilderness by lust for gold. A few days ago, what appear to be the remains of Jesse Capen were finally found after nearly three years of searching. Another obsessive Dutchman Hunter in quest…
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Human Height
True human height is not measured in feet and inches but in the altitude of the thoughts we think and the problems we engage. The higher the problems, the higher the man.
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Why are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself. How is it, for example, that…
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False Modesty
To appear modest, some of us preface our remarks with, "Correct me if I'm wrong." But we say it only when we know we are not.
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Human Perversity
People want sympathy and understanding. But we must be careful how we show them. "I understand exactly how you feel" may earn the response, "You have no idea how I feel, how the hell could you?"