Category: Human Predicament
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The Realist Speaks
Most people are basically decent. Just don't put them under too much moral pressure.
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Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus
They say that love is blind. But if love blinds, is it love? Or is it rather infatuation? "Where there is love, there is sight." I found this fine Latin aphorism in Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 21). The translation is mine. Pieper credits Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences…
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Disgust With Others
How much of disgust with others is disgust at oneself for allowing oneself to be in their midst? And similarly with delight?
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The Measure of Seriousness
Money is the measure of seriousness. And for most the only measure and the only seriousness. I tell myself to avoid misanthropy, but it is a moral challenge. (I tend to alliterate even when I am not trying to: money, measure, most, myself, misanthropy, moral.)
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In the Interests of Prandial Harmony
Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and…
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People
People judge falsely, by what we do, and what we have. They ought to judge by what we are. But they are nothing themselves, so how could they?
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A Poem by Robert Dodsley (1703-1764)
From The Oxford Book of Short Poems, eds. Kavanagh and Michie, OUP 1985, p. 100: Song Man's a poor deluded bubble, Wandering in a mist of lies,Seeing false, or seeing double, Who would trust to such weak eyes?Yet, presuming on his senses, On he goes, most wondrous wise:Doubts of truth, believes pretences, Lost in error lives and dies.
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The Wild Diversity of the Solutions to the Problem of Human Existence
How wildly diverse the concrete solutions to the problem of life that each works out for himself! There was Leon Trotsky the professional revolutionary who worshipped life-long at the altar of politics. Politics was his substitute for religion. (If religion is the opiate of the masses, revolutionary politics is the opiate of the intellectuals.) And…
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Whence the Poignancy of Farewell?
Death presides over all of life, but in leave-takings, while remaining in the background he steps out of the shadows just enough so that the glint of his scythe strikes the eye. A harbinger of the brunt's striking of the neck and the ending of this, our ambiguous sojourn.
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Avis Rara
Man is a strange bird, a rare bird, divided against himself. He is one and two, two and one. Witness to his antics, he listens to himself singing and then bepuzzles himself with thoughts about the Witness (Is it one or many?) and its relation to the feathered biped perched on the branch (identity or…
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Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time
A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown. Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:…
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From Vitalis to Vanitas
What starts out as legitimate grooming and hygiene ends up as vanity.
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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;…
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Skeptical and Credulous
By turns we are too much the one or the other. We find it difficult to balance doubting and believing. Properly deployed, doubt is the engine of inquiry, but it can also become a brake on commitment and thus on living. One cannot live well without belief and trust — but not when they become…
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The Two Kinds of People and the Manifold Uses of Blogging
I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs…