Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist said, “man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” With all due respect to Oscar Wilde it should have been “give him anonymity, and he will tell you the…
Basic human problems can have no final solutions. Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (1967) I love problems. Give me a disaster in my house I can sit down and solve that. Calling the right people, or getting the materials to fix it, fixing it or helping other fix…
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1096.a5 As election day approaches it’s been easy to see some of the ugly…
Do you remember when you were nine or ten? School’s out and it’s a lazy hazy summer day. Sitting under a tree, nothing to do, looking up at the deep blue blue sky. A cool breeze blowing the puffy white clouds across the sky as you gaze at that huge,…
how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! – Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 When you look up at the Milky Way you see millions of stars. Then think about…
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet, Act I, scene 2 Death. Americans in the last part of the 20th century feared it more than anything (and we Americans are a very scared group of people). We fight it and hide from…
The 1% are in the news, and everywhere you turn people are talking about them (mostly themselves talking about themselves). The greed and selfishness they exhibit is staggering and disheartening: The latest is the idea that rich should have more say in government than the poor, put forth by a…
“Fear is the mind-killer“, fear has kept me from writing from my heart and soul for years now. “Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration“, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of no one listening, fear of too much popularity, fear of sounding stupid; has kept me from…