punt

Early September was, long ago. A green breath, it took in the end to summer's troubles and knew nothing of tomorrow's changes.

lick

Decoration is as proper to design as salt is to to a boiled egg, and in about the same proportion.

noise, heat, fuzz

The primary layer of abstraction is vital. And abstractions of abstractions are occasionally necessary, sometimes of use. But further abstractions upon abstracted abstractions are seldom of use, often very dangerous, and carry - moreover - the ordinary dangers even beneficial abstractions carry.

I do not mean to preclude grand theories. Even an ideology may be of use, on balance. But the good grand theories and the useful ideologies, with all their heft and sweep, lie close upon the phenomena, even as an atmosphere clings to its planet.

vampiry

I believe in the usefulness of capitalism expressed into creative play upon a fair market: the marketplace as such. What I do not believe in is efficient market capitalism, whereby a marketplace becomes a unitized and abstracted rudiment of a model that then parades the ability to read the slope of a graph as if that were capitalism. That is not. That is either (benign) a study upon a marketplace, or (malign) a silent vampiry upon the market.

There are many reliable tests of which of those is in operation. The easiest: are greedy men, by their greed, producing usefully, allowing that the use may be subtle?

good breeding

Congregational religion can breed raw populism into civil democracy.

maybe

A peaceful and open society persisting over more than a generation is typically a precondition to widespread political rationality, although hardly a sufficient one, nor - fortunately - even quite a necessary one. This, as much as anything culturally specific, accounts for the post-colonial advantages many democracies experience after their revolutions.

trick question

Does living in a free country mean you have the right to be taken advantage of?

Yes, it's a trick question. But it's also a hard question.

can't buy

Money is enabling. No question about it.

what I am thankful for

I can be better
Without being bigger.

You can be better
Without the prod of pride.

We can be better
By tending what we have.

She can be better
Tell her she is her own.

He can be better
Take none of what is his.

It can be better
As we each tend our plots.

They will be better
When their neighbors are.

Service's Stalin

The productivity of a productive evil man may be interesting. The fitful self-collection of a cowardly man may be interesting. But the evil of an evil man, and the cowardice of those around him -- are not interesting. They merely wait for the septic needfulness of death in this wicked world.

the fall

I want a car
Because it makes me feel good
To have one
And not because I need it.

likewise

Money workers should get paid. Food workers should get fed. Care givers should get love. Interrogators should get tape recorded. Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the grain.

alas

My sentiments are conservative even if most of my views are not. And that conservatism is of a national bent. Put it this way: my feelings want, contrary to fact, something like a Baptist, perhaps even a Mormon, cosmos to exist.

invasive

Action despite incomplete knowledge - often despite considerable ignorance - is a necessary part of life. Certainly we try to increase our understanding and decrease the need to leap into the dark. But we are still often called to decisive action despite substantial uncertainty and ignorance.

Heuristics are called for: morals, mythologies, beliefs. And that's why I can't, as an agnostic, simply say I don't care what other people believe. What we believe, privately, has a profound public impact because our beliefs inform necessary acts in the absence of (or in the teeth of) full, true knowledge.

corner

It is in my veins now; I feel the strong, silent passions again. I am terribly awake.

Peniel

Oh yes, I will put away childish things. I will work upon this world. I will till it and have it yield. I will wrestle with the soil until it blesses me and those I love.

more learned

And why joie de vue? Chiefly because we must treat time as a path down which we walk by our own feet, by our own power, with our own will to progress even though, in truth, time will carry us, conveyor like, whether or not we press forward. But we must own the progression of time in our lives: take the future as something to reach, and not just to let arrive.

I am not timber, clamped to a belt that ratchets towards the buzz saw of death. I am a man, and I will walk all the way, by my own feet, to my own purposes, and be in possession of my time, until I am cut asunder.

I will own myself and leave others glad that it is I and not they, and not fate, and none other, that so owns. I will reverence will; I will reverence love. I'll walk. Nobody and nothing will carry me but that which cannot be stopped, and even then, I will moonwalk upon the conveyer belt of time, as if the passage of my hours were by my own two feet.

what I have learned

What I have learned over the last month is that human expectation is maladapted to time. For time, in fact, is our storehouse: we should fill the racks in sequence, placing the largest items first, letting the smaller items fill the surrounding space, and putting the most awkward items nearest their use or exit, leaving the weildy items to fill the crannies.

But this is not what we do - we treat time not like a warehouse but as a vantage, and clear all impediments to our view of the desired next. Great open vistas, airy boulevards of time stretching to it, but at great cost in productivity.

A middle way is required - to self-discipline and redemption of the time, packing in the work, but also to permitting a certain joie de vue.

bureau again

There is a self-serving variety of self-control that I commend to myself now: to let the leaven work, to have the full loaf, but in due season.

malaprop

Eventually I stale to a task. That misuses 'stale', but none the less what I mean and feel.

fortune cookie

Nobody is good at everything; and those who excel at something excel in little else. Play to your strengths, even as you address your weaknesses.

before next

Expectation makes the interval sag, a the telephone line sags between two old pine poles, weeping tar. This is because inwardly, we tend to measure time from event to event, and not as a clock does.

steely georgian

That we are stuck with others as they are, and ourselves much as we are, sets the outer space, the surrounding void, to our will, which exists on an improbably hospitable and extensive planet of human possibility, both of hope and despair.

policy versus polity

Well, yes, of course it chills renumerated efforts to make a tax code more progressive. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it less good. And everyone likes to spend money that isn't their own. But where is the population mature enough for these and a thousand such observations? Nowhere in time or place. This is the policy point of bureacracy - to create a space, itself costly and distorting, to be sure, for these truths to have a bearing.

parade

It is rare to get an external view of one's intimate friends, and hardly helpful to friendship.

becalmed

I am rarely depressed in the sense of being emotionally down. But I do have periods - stretches of days - in which I am befogged and becalmed, all told.

magnificat

Haunting, profound, and great: that the proud be cursed to be scattered in the imaginations of their own hearts.

fujimori

Scientists and engineers can make fine politicians, but are disproportionately among those who become tyrannical. And that is no suprise.

obvious

Young men unemployed: trouble.

bureau

We do not live in a dystopian world, although there is a great deal of dysfunction, and a significant amount of evil. I would rather live now than in any prior age, if the choice of where I were to be placed were made random per capita (that is, if I had an equal chance of ending up as a person here or there, male or female, sick or healthy, etc.). Obviously if I could pick who I'd end up being, what body and brain I'd comprise, and so on, I might choose something else (to be Abigail Adams?). But realistically, we - the larger we - are the blessed of the ages.

more today

The ennobling is directional, of course, as I've long said. The vote ennobles people, rather than people ennobling their votes.

today

For all my hesitance about democracy, and certainty about its many limits, I remain convinced of the value and superiority of democracy over other forms of government experienced by man. And I remain a lover of its dignification of man, of the romance - and how it romances me - of the polling place, of the vote, of the school cafeteria and folding tables made noble.

next two

A transition succeeds or fails by preservation of momentum coming into the turn, and the application of acceleration coming into the new straightaway.