If it isn’t in another category, it is here.
2
01, 2016
Looking Both Ways
Looking toward the past, and the future, on New Year's Day
30
12, 2015
Times old and new: “objective” creative engagement vs. “subjective” inward regression
"As long as poets express merely their puny subjective impressions, they are not worth the name; but as soon as they know how to appropriate and express the world, they are poets. For then they are inexhaustible and can be constantly new, as opposed to a subjective nature, which quickly expresses its meagre inner life [...]
11
12, 2015
Do scholars hurt the humanities and culture?
We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed.... [T]he objects of culture are not analyzable.... Great works of [...]
7
12, 2015
Joseph Conrad’s Terrorist
The stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered – something really startling – a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious [...]
26
11, 2015
Thinking and Thanking
Rabbit: What are you doing, Hare? Hare: Nothing much, it seems. Rabbit: Ah, the dolce far niente again. It must be your modus vivendi. Hare: There's nothing like a mixture of languages to get me going. So what are you doing? Rabbit: Well, it's harvest season. I'm busy preparing for winter. Every day there seems more to do. [...]
12
11, 2015
The Temple of Daily Fame
Journalists have erected for themselves a small wooden chapel that they call the Temple of Fame, in which they continuously affix and remove portraits, making such a racket that one cannot hear oneself speak. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
10
11, 2015
STEM talks
Grundlos: Watch out, you almost ran me over! Where are you rushing off to? Magnus: I'm off to give a talk and I'm in a hurry. Grundlos: What is the talk about? You're not very dressed up. Magnus: Look, that's not necessary. It's about the meaning of STEM. Grundlos: What is STEM? Magnus: Don't you [...]
28
10, 2015
The peasant and the vine
Seeing how useful the vine was, the peasant supported it at a height with many props. Then, once he had harvested its grapes, he raised the stakes and let it fall, building a fire with the props. Leonardo da Vinci, Fables
27
10, 2015
Love and moral progress
If genuine love for a young man or for a woman does not seek witnesses, but reaps its harvest of pleasure even if it fulfills its desires in secret, then it is even more likely that someone who loves goodness and wisdom, who is intimate and involved with virtue because of his actions, will be [...]
26
10, 2015
Socrates on the periphery
That Socrates knew how to speak from the periphery to encounter the riddles of life.