Enjoying the view from Limbo
Party life.— Stay out of the partisan ruse that passes itself off as politics today. No taking sides, no “lesser of two evils” rationalizations, no caring about the parties’ mutual assured destruction shadow play as though you were not their intended victim. To care is to delude oneself that there is something within the realm of practical possibility which would be better, and...
An alien perspective.– During my early years in Korea, I taught children, mostly elementary school students, at a private academy. Sometimes, with the younger groups, particularly if there were some rambunctious boys in the class, I would exploit my foreignness and their low English levels by teasing them with the claim that I was an alien. After a few incredulous guffaws from the...
As I am sure everyone knows by now, the United States Federal Government is about to make its first (allegedly) open disclosure about UFOs, which they have renamed with the military-speak abstraction UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), presumably to avoid laughing every time they name the subject of the report. Since there are about a hundred different angles from which to come at this...
I have a city-dwelling student who has recently begun to take a keen interest in the special wonders of the night sky. She sometimes sends me urgent messages to alert me to a perfect crescent moon, or to ask me which star is shining so bright on the horizon this evening. On a couple of occasions, the objects she is noticing, as though...
The cosmos self-corrects, and that certainly includes the human portion of the cosmos, to the extent it may be regarded separately. One might object that to say the cosmos self-corrects is to suggest that “The Whole” itself is flawed, which might reasonably lead one to ask, “Flawed against what standard?” Nevertheless it is so, although I prefer to say incomplete rather than flawed...
As the city aggrandizes itself, it carelessly obliterates the night sky. On the clearest night these days, no more than a few stars are visible from my neighborhood. Artificial light spreads and engulfs all with its perpetual gaudy clarity, hiding the natural obscurity that once provided the divine backdrop highlighting the distant presence of the most ancient light, thus serving as man’s daily...
Empedocles is the only evolutionist whose theory impresses me in the least, because he is the only one who is rational enough not to imagine he is describing a rectilinear development, and expansive enough not to harbor any self-flattering hidden premise that he is living in an “advanced” stage of the process he describes. On the contrary, he saw all too clearly what...
Several days ago, I wrote a short piece about Socrates’ description of the Earth to his companions, as he sat in his prison cell awaiting the hemlock. Today, as a spiritual escape from the moral prison formed of modern politics and the mass hysteria of coronavirus, I would like to reflect on one of the key themes of that famous episode in the...
Some weeks ago, a student who knows a great deal about my character and interests contacted me with the urgent advice to run outside as quickly as possible, so as not to miss the gorgeous moonrise she was witnessing from a bus across town. Yesterday, the same young woman contacted me with similar urgency, at roughly the same late afternoon hour, to ask,...
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