Weekly Features Post
Issue XXIV
Stone sober. Eric Scheske has a bum gall bladder and he's guessing it's having an adverse effect on his drinking. He has no doctor's opinion to support the drinking connection, but beer unduly fills him up these days and more than a few glasses of wine sends knife-like stabs through his innards. As the gall bladder worsens, so does the sobriety.
Eric would remove the gall bladder himself, but he's afraid of knives. Later this month, he'll submit to the surgeon. He will supposedly be too drugged up to work for three days, so that means he'll be home, in front of the computer, looking for blogging stories. He has never posted more than fifteen stories in a day. Look for that record to be broken. The prose might be incoherent, but we're anticipating high volume. Kind of like heavy metal and rap music.
The blog continues to grow, though the growth slowed a bit recently, due (we're guessing) to the nice weather. Things are popping again now.
We appreciate your efforts to forward our URL to potential readers. Next week, we plan to make it easier by installing a direct e-mail link from each post. When we get that feature up, please use it frequently.
Definition of a Waste of Money
In case you're thinking about buying a dictionary of mediaeval history, stay away from the one published by The Philosophical Library. A ton of entries, but with definitions far (far) too brief to be of much use. It was published back in 1964, so this isn't exactly "news you can use." We're just mad that we wasted $10 on it and wanted to vent.
Stoic's Porch
"The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company." Seneca
Anonymous Thoughts on Authenticity
It was Thomas Merton who first explained to me the importance of authentic living. He explained that authenticity means living without regard to the conventional thinking of mass society.
Mass society is the relentless waive of the public that accosts our minds at every turn: on radio, television, movies, billboards. Mass society is pernicious because, as Sören Kierkegaard pointed out, “the public is made up of individuals at the moments when they are nothing.” The public man is concerned with how he appears to others; not with how he is. If we all begin to imitate the public man in our private lives, we all will live inauthentically because we will be more concerned with appearance than our existence. As more and more people live inauthentically–as mass society becomes more and more pervasive–it becomes harder and harder to live authentically because we will constantly be among people who aren't living authentically.
When we recoil and “find ourselves” by detaching ourselves from the public void, we are in a position to start understanding the real issues of existence, with all its horror and its beauty. From this position come the true artists, poets, and saints.
But the authentic man in an inauthentic setting is an odd thing and in many ways is a pathetic display. It is the situation of Prince Myshkin, the idiot in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Prince Myshkin, the perfect man–simple and honest, the embodiment of Christ–suffered mercilessly at the hands of nineteenth-century Russian society before he lapsed into insanity and was sent to an asylum.
Strays
Author Judith "Warner is not the first to note that feminism's ascension on college campuses paralleled the rise of anorexia nervosa." The Atlantic, June 2005, p. 110.
"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men." Samuel Adams
"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency." Theodore Roosevelt
"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty." Simone Weil
"If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?" Benjamin Franklin
Last Word
Vease: The run before the leap. "The vease was too much for that Georgia woman."
