Category: Slow Down!
-
The Made Man
He who is ever on the make will never have it made. He will never be a 'made man.' There is a time to strive, and a time to be. Is the universe trying to get somewhere? It already is everywhere. Are you any less cosmic? If you think you have a Maker, is he…
-
Happy Birthday to the King of the Beats, the Saint of the Slackers
At any given time I am reading about 20 books. Yesterday afternoon, while reducing the whole of an Arturo Fuente 'Curly Head' to smoke and ashes, I enjoyed Chapter Seven, "Beats, Nonconformists, Playboys, and Delinquents" of Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). …
-
The Philosophical Foundations of Slackerdom
Ludwig Wittgenstein took a dim view of Bertrand Russell's nontechnical writings. They would include such provocative pieces as In Praise of Idleness.
-
Carpe Diem!
I quoted Jim Morrison on the eve of the 40th anniversary of his death: "The future's uncertain, and the end is always near." This morning I discovered that Rob Grill, lead singer of The Grassroots, has passed on. Their first top ten hit, "Live forToday," made the charts in the fabulous and far-off Summer of…
-
Lanza del Vasto on Enchainment to Mere Means
Lanza del Vasto, Principles and Precepts of the Return to the Obvious (Schocken 1974, no translator listed), p. 93: The Pursuit of the Useful raises an endless staircase in front of men. Whoever climbs it with all his strength and all his thought can but come out of it dead, without even having perceived that…
-
On Accomplishing Non-Accomplishment
Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot — this too is a sort of accomplishment. You have to work at it a bit. Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and…
-
Quo Vadis?
The universe is in no big rush to get somewhere. So why are you? Whither goest thou?
-
A Rare Find: The Anatomy of Bibliomania
One of the pleasures of the bookish life is the 'find,' the occasion on which, whilst browsing through a well-stocked used book store, one lights upon a volume which one would never discover in a commercial emporium devoted to the purveyance of contemporary schlock. One day, after a leisurely lunch, I walked into a book…