Skip to main content

Posts

Marcus Aurelius on not getting mad because he knows better. From Book Two. Co-operation of ugly and beautiful.

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, the arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.   All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.  But I who have seen the nature of good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly,  ....and the nature of him who does wrong,  ...that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed,  ....but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity,  ....I can neither be injured by any of them,  ....for no one can fix on me what is ugly,  ....nor can I be angry with my kinsman,  ....nor hate him,  ....for we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. -Marcus Aurelius, book two of The Meditations . link to the Public Domain ebook version on Project Gutenberg: here.
Recent posts

Merriam-Webster on April 1.

Merriam Webster's word of the day today was "shenanigans" , one I at first chose for my page, but opted-out without a reliable trail of provenance.  Plenty of shenanigans today, already.

word of the day: pookah

pookah , noun (Celtic origin) A spirit animal that represents something in the real world, usually a person. (word used prominently to refer to the character's imaginary friend in the classic film Harvey. )

I had some concerns.

  d My concern about this scene, Irvin Kirschner, was that it was easy to apply the dialogue to either the protagonist or the antagonist: thus its, well, good for the body politick, who frequently toss the same arguments back and forth for alternating causes of the proverbial red or blue, such as the present, "two-tiered justice system".  Former VP Pence has somewhat threaded this needle, notwithstanding present legal actions, noting the political targeting of a certain prosecution, and not the validity of the prosecution, but the motive for pursuing the prosecution. But in politics, so often, so much of what is done is wholly un-necessary, and seemingly designed to feed a dialogue, seeming sometimes to me like the elected officials intentionally feed their media counterparts, in order to keep the daily trudge of political news going.  In fact, there are times when it seems the various television outlets are focused solely on the two party figureheads, and I have to rely on

poem: I loved thee well, analog robot fog.

I loved thee well; I loved thee true-- forestalled ambitions at the knell, so much else, to ignore, or to do. If as my father, me you saw, you would also love me well, but remind me so much of my flaws. If I had a megaphone, a plastic yellow mouthpiece at my beckon; all from the quaint ingenuity, of a man dictating from the between the walls of his home: of a man of pale fog-colored obscurity speaking thoughts that were none but his own. Or if I were Dave Ramsey, or Alex Jones. If I spoke my truth-- would those words ring your ears; would any of it seem comprehensible to you? What if I were a brown-eyed ewe, who without the wisdom of her years, forsook her own eyes to have hers turn blue? A homosexual who owned a logging company-- once, me: knees-up, him: with his cool hand in my mouth, spoke of things I should do; By experience many worlds in betwixt and between, but nevertheless, his searching, longing spirit calling out,  he had spoken, lost on me, his own truth. Would my truth be b