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The damage

Perhaps the worst damage is that which leaves one unable to calculate the damage.

Labels

I dislike the imprecision of labels, but if one had to embrace one, one could do worse than "humanist."

There comes a time (Camus)

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.

Albert Camus, The Plague

$

Money doesn't buy beauty,
but it buys (or rents) access to beauty.

The false

The false can enrich, but never replace, the true.

Is it possible? (Tolstoy)

How can one be well...when one suffers morally?  Is it possible to remain at ease in our time, if one has any feeling?

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

New poems

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It is not

Whatever knowledge is, it is not an answer.
Whatever wisdom is, it is not a comfort.

Idea

What rational idea is ever as violently-defended as the irrational one?

Alone (James)

Our knowledge of ourselves is that we are alone, and our dream of ourselves is that we are alone because we are unique.

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia

Of artists

Rather than (merely) condemn them, we should rejoice that artists are (merely) human. How terrible if they were not!

Not so (Miłosz)

Nature's kingdom is not our home. We belong to it, and yet we do not belong. In nature's kingdom necessity is the only good: not so for us.

Czesław Miłosz

What is moved

To know the wind, don't look for the wind:
look for what is moved by it.

New poems

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Jewels

Remember that dewdrops were not first seen as jewels; jewels were first seen as dewdrops.

A real seeker (Descartes)

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.

René Descartes

The pervasive

The pervasive is persuasive.

Our conceit (Mann)

In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows.

Golo Mann, Geschichte und Geschichten

Not everything

Not everything lends itself to synthesis.

Still (Saigyō)

At the roadside
Where a clear stream bubbles
In the shade of the willows,
"Just for a while," I said,
And still have not gone.

Priest Saigyō

Waned

My enthusiasm has waned
as the rewards have dwindled.

New poems

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Still (Canin)

My life was still nothing more than the world that had presented itself to me.

Ethan Canin, A Doubter's Almanac

On culture

Culture is, should be, must be,
voracious and omnivorous.

The splinter (James)

It is always useful to be reminded that if an ideology contains a prejudice, the prejudice is likely to have been there first, like the splinter in the fester...

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia

The result

Certainty is always the result of oversimplification.

New poems

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The Sirens

What are we that we should respond so to the Sirens we encounter?

What are they, that they should know just the right songs?