“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
At 73 the weight of regrets I carry is akin to a persistent extra 20 pounds I must support – not knee buckling but psychically insistent or maybe a gray cloud close to the ground just within my peripheral vision and always present. The regrets are personal and professional and include missed connections, mishandled opportunities, cowardly evasions, foolish remarks, mean actions, a misreading of my own character’s strengths while I […]
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“A screaming comes across the sky” is the first sentence of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the greatest American novel about how the combination of modern science, 20th century fanaticism and the nation-state can wreak terrible damage on human beings. The “screaming” might refer to the V2 rocket, the screaming of its victims, air raid sirens, and the overall effects of such an air attack on London. It describes a moment […]
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Murder is the taking of another’s life. Whatever the weapon, the killer pulls the life from the victim’s body. What’s left is empty. The killer makes a zero where there had been a 1. Murder is both the annihilation of history and its engineer. It removes a person from what he or she would have done with the rest of a life. It makes future children, future wives and husbands, […]
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A convincing argument could be made that human beings are the species that tells itself lies to make it to the next day. Instead of Homo Sapien, Wise Man, perhaps we are instead the Lying Beast or Mendacium Bestia, a term that also dispenses with the patriarchal collective noun Man and perhaps better captures our true nature in many respects as well. In 1981 I went without any food for […]
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