At least strongly encouraged

Everyone should be compelled
to follow their thinking
to its conclusion.

The individual

The individual is an epiphenomenon of the construct of free will.

Easy & hard

Entropy dismantles identity.
To be something is easy;
to be this or that, so hard.

On heaven & hell

Heaven is a child's dream;
hell is consequence + entropy.

Ignorant and proud of it (Montesquieu)

As for those who proclaim that they are ignorant and proud of it, what they would like is to see the whole of mankind forgotten as completely as they will be themselves.

A man who lacks some talent makes up for it by despising it, and so removes this obstacle lying between himself and personal merit; this is how he gets on the same level as the man whose work he finds redoubtable.

Montesquieu, Persian Letters

Important things

Any society which does not allow people
time and opportunity to do important things
is a contemptible failure.

Should not be

Discovering or deciding where you stand
should not be a sentence to never move
from that spot again.

What I know

If I interpret every experience
only in terms of what I already know,
then how did I acquire that knowledge?

On trust

Every failure in my life was the result of misplaced trust.

Opportunity

Salvation is opportunity.

Spiderweb with dew

On poverty

Distraction is poverty.

UNcommon

What impresses me is uncommon sense.

Provocative

Provocative doesn't mean antagonistic.

New poems

+15

Conversion

Consciousness converts death from necessity to tragedy.

The simplistic

The simplistic is only useful to the extent that the incorrect can be useful.

"The Word 2"

Third Wednesday has accepted my poem "The Word 2" and will be publishing it in their winter issue in December!

Our time (Einstein)

Perfection of tools and confusion of aims are characteristic of our time.

Albert Einstein

On meaning

Meaning is born of attention.

On horror

Horror was born as wonder.

Rancor (Schlesinger)

Rancor is one of the unavowed but potent emotions of politics; and one must never forget that the envy of the have-nots can be quite as consuming when the haves have character or intelligence as it is when they have merely material possessions.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

On abstraction

The best adversary of impersonal abstraction is personal abstraction.

New poems

+15

They lost all (Hamilton)

Is it rational that now when the young people may have to face problems harder than we face, is it reasonable that with the atomic age before them, at this time we are giving up the study of how the Greeks and Romans prevailed magnificently in a barbaric world; the study, too, of how that triumph ended, how a slackness and softness finally came over them to their ruin? In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security, a comfortable life, and they lost all—security and comfort and freedom.

Edith Hamilton

Mood: Lost in a fog

Reservation

I reserve my industry
for the worthwhile, not the necessary.

Double (Van Doren)

The mind of man has always lived a double life, or had a double function:  to go forth and return.  Or perhaps one should say, to discover and remember.

Mark Van Doren

Less

I will take less, but I will never settle for it.

What they mean

Every time someone says "God"
they mean "I don't know."