or DC

New York, in residential experience, is simply a string of neighborhoods, and feels smaller than Atlanta, or even Charlotte. The experience of living in New York (other than working, and assuming one isn't in a car) is not more akin to living in Asheville, North Carolina, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, than it is to living in Los Angeles.

Do

I'd be happier if I read less, thought less. But happiness is not my goal.

Neptune

Nihilism finds fertile ground in any abstraction: of value from things (money); of people from place (prisons); of knowledge from purpose. And abstractions that cannot find their justification elsewhere find their excuse in nihilism.

siren

Pleasure is a serious, deep and wide topic, with as many varieties and implications as political subjects ever manage.

caffine

Exaggeration is vulgarity.
Vulgarity is exaggeration.

Or very nearly so.

Exaggeration is a means of thought, argumentation and expression, and as such it is useful although overused because it is easier than the alternatives. It is sometimes also an aesthetic end in itself, and as such can be beautiful unless it is becomes pornographic.

Exaggeration in all its varieties is at its best when it is a means of simplification, and at its worst when it is lost to means and ends and exists merely as an unconscious personal characteristic or habitual stimulant.

Alexis

Democracies need popular experience with working in assemblies: clubs, chambers of commerce, congregations and so on.

auto

I have analytic taste but synthetic thought. That suggests an urban preference and plenty else.

switch

Most of the crass and ugly things we (correctly) accuse money of being could, were we cruel, be said of family or thought. One of money's intellectual uses is that it takes its lashes patiently silently and stays strong, a whipping boy, while we spare the more delicate and favored child, who will be lost to us if we strike him.

first love

Halt! Who goes there?
A friend.
What's the password?
I don't know.
You may pass.

hippocratic

For lawyers, a variant: first, do your client no harm.

escalade

Some practical tools masquerade as jewlery. Sometimes for vanity, sometimes for sales, but perhaps sometimes out of decency?

And so with all forms of carriage. A pine box needs something with which to cover itself if it is to really to honor its contents.

furrow

This is work
That must be done
So do it.

I will,
I said I would,
I like to work
And I need the money.

Or not the money but to be
Left to work this field I need.

For these tools are what are mine
And these blisters tell me
I am a man.

But let it be this field:
Not for its good soil,
Not for my fellow hands
But because of its place.

Well placed, for from it we can
Hear that love, that carillon,
Whose bells reach no park and no shore,
None at leisure but only
Nearer fields, that are plowed
To the faded tang of long seconds
That bear foundry air,
Heavy from ore.

In this field,
When the good wind carries,
The hands can hear
The peals that call
As if to reverence him,
To whom,
I toil.

going home

I said that there is a kind of exhaustion and a kind of sadness that are alike. But really there are more than one kind of each - exhaustion and sadness - that are alike. And many of these are found in loving, or in being loved, or in both. And what kinds of love? Probably many, but at least in familial love.

bakbakk bakbakk bakbakk

The word locomotive manages to be both onomatopoetic and classically rooted, both awkward and elegant.

I'll bet there were Ceasers who were less Latinate.

middlemarch

There is something so perfectly middle aged about spying.

well

"Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly" ... well, here comes a beautiful lie.

going

There is a kind of exhaustion and a kind of sadness that are alike.

congregation

The religious life is a preparation for the democratic life. In both there is the potential for a sublimation of the popular will. In the reasonable living of either there is tension, and it is in the tuning rather than the undoing of this tension that hope lies.

The idea that life is about productive tension is the serious stake-claim of democratic or religious thinking. The observation that democracy and religion are great taming forces is the underlying justification for either.

Less bloodshed and plenty to think about is not a bad bargain.

picturesque

There is that strange temptation, for the observer, of beautiful human situations that are awful for those who put on the show. The doomed romance, say. Or the still-innocent but randy teen, trying to scramble onto the pedestal of his beloved and surprised to find not marble and alabaster, but just another person. The new recruit to a political cause that promises tomorrow. A world's fair.

taurus

For my part, I am not a naturalist. Mysticism under oppression is the natural state of man, but not the desired state.