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Fairness Which Strikes the Eye
Sometimes it seems we cannot help ourselves –the pull of the tide is just too strong to resist. And sometimes an argument, when considered too quickly, too uncritically, captures us with its ostensibly intuitive wisdom. We have no need to question it. No need to probe the basis of its logic. The rhetoricians of old…
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Sweet Flowers are Slow
It never ceases to amaze me what unfettered minds can discover. Sometimes I wonder how they do it. How they set out 180 degrees from the target and still end up hitting it. Of course, the world is full of answers scattered like flowers in a field, in plain sight for anybody who…
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Living the Lie
I’ve been living a lie all these years it would seem. I always thought it was okay to like some things and not others. Some people, and not their friends… All my life I’ve wandered between likes and dislikes like a child in a supermarket, never wedded to a particular product, always willing to abandon…
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Eternal Maternal?
Some things are just not said, just not considered. They fall so far outside of our Weltanschauung they are inadmissible. And we take such comfort in their ubiquity that we no longer feel a need to discuss them. They are so self-evidently true, so axiomatic to our understanding of existence that they seem indispensable. Crucial……
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A Plague on Both Your Houses
The plague –nothing conjures up death quite like that word -after all, the bubonic plague wiped out half of Europe in the 14th century. But there have been others of its ilk –and all probably caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium. Although the yet-unnamed infectious agent was identified in the 1890ies by the bacteriologist Alexandre…
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Peekaboo
Seeing is believing, my mother used to say when she saw I hadn’t finished the spinach on my plate despite my protestations to the contrary. But what if the belief were to persist in the absence of visual corroboration? Suppose I simply closed my eyes and pointed at the plate? My mother, no solipsist, would…
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She wears her faith but as the fashion of her phone.
Everything is a matter of time, isn’t it? Everything changes. Like the apocryphal monkeys typing away infinitely, everything will be written. Everything will be transmogrified somewhere. Some time. Somehow. I suppose that should be a comfort, but I can’t escape the nagging feeling that there is something unrequited in all that: an imbalance between now…
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Different Flavours
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy –so says Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I suppose as one ages, there is a tendency to become, if not indifferent, then less surprised at the plethora of variations that exist when they are sought, less amazed at the range of combinations…