“When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout” …. On the wall in the gym of Jefferson Junior High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee …
“Never before have times resembled the present than they do
now” … a famous American politician and ex-President …
My brother explaining the hereafter to his future wife one
day in the Smokey Mountains: “If you are not here after what I am here after,
you will be here after I have gone” …
“leave that damned bear alone” … my mother yelled at our dog
one day in the Smokey Mountains …
“Why?” Noah asked G-d and got a lecture on the history of
the universe in response …
“Don’t ask the question if you don’t want to hear the answer”
my father’s advice to one of my sisters …
At a graduate symposium someone asked O. K. Bouwsma that he
wanted to leave Locke’s methaphysics of substance and properties behind and
talk about Plato’s Symposium, and Bouwsma framed the essential question of that
dialogue and said, “What is love?” and I said that it was like substance and
properties … substance being what properties got stuck in and I supidly said
that love was what people got stuck in and Bouwsma made me repeat it and said
he thought it was the glue that binds us together … I never spoke in those symposia again … I
am such a slow and poor learner …
On a gravestone in a cemetery on Lookout Mountain outside
Denver there was a tombstone that read “Life is a joke and all things show … at
first I wan’t sure but now I know it.”
On a road trip I once tried to guess what my little sister
was thinking … after many tries I gave up and she said in response to my
question what she was thinking … “nothing”
…
I think the phrase “faith, hope and charity” is backwards …
charity should come first … and then followed by hope of better times for all …
and perhaps much later … a little faith … start with what one can do … the with what one hopes for all … and then
perhaps faith will arrive … I am still working on the first step in that
trilogy …
mike
