Tag: history
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Experience is of no practical value; it is merely the name we give to our mistakes
We’re curious creatures, we humans; in our Western society at least, it is a common conceit to think we are so unique that we’ve each taken a different route to end up where we are; we’ve followed unexpected detours, braved gravel roads that wound through thick, unnamed forests; got lost innumerable times until we found…
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Dost thou conspire against thy friend?
What is it that makes us believe? For that matter, what is belief? If it has evidence to support it, does it transmute into knowledge -a different Magisterium? When I was a child, every once in a while when I happened to think about somebody, the phone would ring and it would be them. It…
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The liability of intelligence
As I age, what I once thought I knew about intelligence has evolved, partially because knowledge has itself changed over time, of course, but also because what we value, what we regard as appropriate, unfolds differently as society develops. It’s why we seem to espouse new ethical standards, find new ways of interpreting History, and…
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What really happened?
Tell me, what are you supposed to do when there’s more than one version of the same event: when you have multiple choices? Tell me what you are supposed to think when there are a variety of remembered histories, each claiming its own validity, its own proof. If it was a tale of conquest, a…
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Will this look of thine hurl my soul from heaven?
‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, wrote Yeats in his magnificent poem The Second Coming. That’s how I feel sometimes, when I think about the things I was taught and came to accept. Came to expect, because what we see is so often laden with expectations. We accept what our culture paints, so we are…
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Is memory the warder of the brain?
I have to be honest, I do not understand the younger generation -well, anymore than it understands me, I suppose. But I recognize that, unlike them, I am not working from a clean slate, and although I have usually tried to think for myself, I am still affected by things past -in fact, I imagine…
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The Path to Grandma’s house
There are many under-appreciated people in our lives, don’t you think? People without whom we might live a very different existence, or inhabit an unfamiliar mind. And, especially, there are those who have not only affected us, but also those who care for us: our families. I never thought of my grandmother like that, but…
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What do you mean?
What do we mean by meaning? Whoaa. I love questions like that: an autological wrestling match, perhaps, and yet an important one, I think. Does everything have meaning, or does that happen only when there is an intention that it should? Meaning, after all, is not necessarily inherent in everything -a rock lying on the…
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Neither here nor there
I don’t think I’m very good at handling conflicts -I hate confrontation; I prefer the view from the top of the Bell Curve where I can safely watch the goings-on of the extremophiles in their respective antipodes. I suppose that’s why I gravitate to boundaries where, if I’m careful, I’m neither here nor there. This…
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In praise of an empty brain
How do I love thee, Age? Let me count the ways… Well, actually I’m not actually going to, because of late, I’ve fallen out with it. Perhaps it’s just my memory that’s falling, though: I was about to parody Shakespeare -it’s what I knew I knew, and yet I didn’t (it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.…
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