I found this in Burton’s commentary to his Kasidah. The exclamation point I am sure is Burton’s. From Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, [...]
Category Archives: Comments on Life
Newman, and Burton.
08-Jul-12The Intelligent Idle.
02-Jul-12I did enjoy this piece in the Times quite a bit on busy-ness and idleness. When I have thought about where I belong, and who “my people” are, the best answer I can come up with is that my people are “the intelligent idle,” or perhaps “the idle intelligent.” I feel this used to be [...]
The Richness of Human Life.
15-May-12Two fifth grade students finished their tests later than the rest of the class and as a result their tests ended up in a different pile from everyone else’s, and when I got to grading them I figured I would skip the scantron – it was only two tests – and grade them by hand. [...]
Individualism.
20-Apr-12I love being around people, but so many are so dead-set on throwing their lives away on trivia that frequently the easiest way to have any experience of being alive is alone. And yet no solution is more unacceptable than solitude.
Because, for all its problems, you can bet that even in a town like Tombstone, Arizona, “the rottenest place you ever saw,” in the 19th century someone somewhere in town had a bust of Goethe.
Disconnection.
02-Jan-12One of the strange and unpleasant things about being away from my cabin is the fact that I can be contacted at any moment, and, being in need of employment, I have nothing particularly better to do; and so I find myself constantly opening my phone, or refreshing my computer screen, like a five-year-old trying [...]
Regrets of the Dying.
02-Dec-11I think we all know these things, and yet we see other people heading right for these same regrets, and are powerless to stop it. http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html
Reading a fair amount of Plutarch recently, the lives of Timoleon, Aemilius Paulus, Pelopidas, and Marcellus. What a superb man. Below is very nearly a summa of the highest, deeds-oriented (as opposed to eloquence-oriented) Classicism. You can hear how much he shaped the writerly outlook on Montaigne fifteen centuries later – what a thought, that [...]
Love and Being Loved.
06-Nov-11The rest of this poem is nothing special to me, but I was very affected by these lines of Philip Larkin: In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have [...]
Pros ton theon.
10-Sep-12“Shams and reality are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and [...]