Around and About

I’m thinking about what should/could/might be here, so this will be edited as I realize what ought to appear. Surely links to my Home Page (in need of a retread but still having links to other elements of my weblife), possibly some autobiographical this’n’that… The 50th college reunion provides an opportunity for an expanded summary of thoughts and doings.

Thinking Through is representative of what I aspire to do more of. It begins

What follows is just another in a long series of attempts to write my way out of a puzzlement, placed here so that I can find it again someday, so that I can point others to it, and so that I can stop thinking about it. It’s digressive and mostly self-serving, but I hope not without interest.

…and includes this flight of self-analysis:

The danger for me is that whimsy sometimes skates too close to misanthropy where the follies of others are concerned. There’s a lot to be outraged about, scornful toward, to decry and bemoan. Sometimes I notice that my irritation has precisely no effect upon the continuing supply of provocations and idiocies, but I’m easily sucked in when the next preposterosity is announced. And sometimes the outrage is clearly justified, not misplaced, and demands some response beyond ‘not really my business’… and what then? Pointing out error to like-minded others doesn’t do much but reinforce one’s own sense of rightness; engaging with those who are not like-minded invites the very sort of disputes I’ve spent my life avoiding. And yet I know there’s good and evil, greed and generosity, progress and retrogression, honesty and deception, the open and the closed, multifaceted truth and multifaceted falsity too. The Emperor is Nekkid, dammit.

1 thought on “Around and About

  1. Charles Strickland

    My own meanderings whilst “self isolating” in my apartment in Doha had me thinking of those who have influenced me over the years … Wanting to say thanks for having wear a Theravaden Buddhist monks robe in your Peoples and Cultures of Asia class at Acadia back a lifetime and more ago. Good to see and read you still ruminate …

    Reply

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