Thursday, December 13, 2018

Few men come to die in the opinion that it is their latest hour,,,, Which happens by reason that we set too much value upon ourselves; it seems as if the universality of things were in some measure to suffer by our dissolution, and that it commiserates our condition, forasmuch as our disturbed sight represents things

Michel de Montaigne

Monday, December 03, 2018

Montaigne on Death

But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give us no assistance at all.  A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.  There have, anciently, been men so excellent managers of their time that they have tried even in death itself to relish and taste it, and who have bent their utmost faculties of mind to discover what this passage is, but they are none of them come back to tell us the news....
 

Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a philosopher, a friend of his: “Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now? what is she doing?  What are you thinking of?”--“I was thinking,” replied the other, “to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it.” 


Michel de Montaigne

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune, and take that she first presents to me; they are all alike to me, I never design to go through any of them; for I never see all of anything…. Of a hundred members and faces that everything has, I take one, one while to look it over only, another while to ripple up the skin, and sometimes to pinch it to the bones: I give a stab, not so wide but as deep as I can, and am for the most part tempted to take it in hand by some new light I discover in it.

Michel de Montaigne

Thursday, October 25, 2018

He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?

Michel de Montaigne

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics. 

John Grey, as quoted by Casey Cep in "Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism" in the New Yorker.

 


Wednesday, October 10, 2018


The fruit of riches is in abundance; satiety declares abundance.

"Divinarum fructus est in copia; copiam declarat satietas." —Cicero,
as quoted by Michel de Montaigne

Saturday, October 06, 2018

That our opinion gives the value to things is very manifest in the great number of those which we do, not so much prizing them, as ourselves, and never considering either their virtues or their use, but only how dear they cost us, as though that were a part of their substance; and we only repute for value in them.... as it weighs, it serves for so much as it weighs.... the price gives value to the diamond.

Michel de Montaigne

Saturday, September 29, 2018

We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Friday, September 28, 2018

For you, no problem.

Reply at rental car return in Lisboa.

Friday, September 07, 2018

Solitude seems to me to wear the best favor in such as have already employed their most active and flourishing age in the world's service…. We have lived enough for others; let us at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call in our thoughts and intentions to ourselves, and to our own ease and repose…. We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. 'Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow. Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and concentrate them in and for ourselves. He that can cast off within himself and resolve the offices of friendship and company, let him do it. In this decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome, and importunate to others, let him take care not to be useless, burdensome, and importunate to himself. Let him soothe and caress himself, and above all things be sure to govern himself with reverence to his reason and conscience to that degree as to be ashamed to make a false step in their presence.... The stoutest and most resolute natures render even their seclusion glorious and exemplary.

Michel de Montaigne

Friday, August 24, 2018

Let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them lay their hands upon their hearts, and then say whether, on the contrary, they do not rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the world to make their private advantage at the public expense. The corrupt ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be very good. 

Michel de Montaigne

Thursday, August 09, 2018

Ecology and evolution are deeply intertwined. Just as the death and decay of organisms provide raw materials for subsequent generations, so too the deaths of species spawn new possibilities for future generations of species. Without extinction, there would be insufficient ecological space for evolution to explore alternative solutions and diversify into new life forms. When initially faced with some change to their native environments, species don’t grimly stay put and evolve into new forms better suited to the transformed conditions. They move, tracking the old habitat. In general, it’s only when the old habitat disappears that species are forced to adapt or die. Mass extinctions—the dying off of multiple, distantly-related lineages over vast areas in a short span of time—occur when one or more external forces wipe out a range of habitats, cutting off opportunities for tracking habitats.  Over the past half-billion  years, there have been five major mass extinctions, with the dinosaurs wiped out in the most recent of these. We now face the sixth mass extinction, which threatens to tear apart the fabric of the biosphere, with drastic consequences for most life on this planet, including us. In better times, species losses tick along at a barely discernable rate—perhaps one every five years. At present, somewhere between 50 and 150 species disappear every day, never to be seen again.... This time around, a single species—Homo sapiens—has become the external force driving the decimation of millions of other species. Yes, we are the asteroid now colliding with the planet. 


Scott D. Sampson, Dismiss dinosaurs as failures...and pave a path to a bleak future

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

“I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”


EU folks talking to/about the UK on Brexit (in The New Yorker)

Thursday, July 19, 2018

I'm just an aging political officer.  Coffee is fuel, travel is opportunity.

In response to an old friend

Thursday, July 12, 2018

He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfillment in such roundabout and often terrible ways.

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George




Tuesday, June 26, 2018

You don't need to be a deer to know to stay off the highway.


Heard on the Equator

Thursday, April 05, 2018

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

Saturday, March 31, 2018

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people so confident, as those who entertain us with fables.

Michel de Montaigne

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.


Mark Twain, as quoted in The Consciousness Deniers, Galen Strawson (NYRB, March 13, 2018)

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Retracing your steps can help you remember what you were looking for.  Your memory of a thought is married to the place in which it first occurred to you.

Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

Wednesday, March 07, 2018

Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.


Mike Tyson, as quoted by Avishai Margalit in the NYRB.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?

Michel de Montaigne 

Friday, February 23, 2018

For Kevin

Death wipes everything away
Except for the living.
We are each a world.
And all there will ever be.


Caught in the ether.  

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

We're an information economy.... it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.  Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

William Gibson,  Johnny Mnemonic


Saturday, February 17, 2018

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

Michel de Montaigne 

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Natural Teleology


Natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately conscious, organisms.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.... A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Most people don’t like righteousness in others. They can be quite righteous about it.

Louis Menand, The New Yorker (January 8, 2018)

Monday, January 08, 2018

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. 


Philip Larkin, The Old Fools