When you take the bus you get used to waiting and watching the cars go by when you are a gamer you might aspire to be a first person shooter when you are one of Plato's butchers you cut meat at the joints when you are dry or thirsty for coffee you might try the cafeteria but you probably won't like it when you are a child and it rains and it storms and the storm sewers overflow onto the streets you meet your first tadpoles and perhaps a frog or two when you work in a hospital you have to go to a lot of meetings and are exposed to all kinds of germs but every once in a while someone asks you how you are when you think about it you can't really help the way you look so you must forgive yourself for that and for the bald patches starting on your forehead and the back of your head.

You said it was an omen when a cardinal crossed my path or when a groundhog paused to look when I spoke hello a word of greeting that every living thing knows and answers to and responds with a pause and a breathing mark like some scholar reading Greek with a diacritic signalling him to roughen his tone for his master ten thousand thousand generations since anybody even spoke like that or conspired to resurrect the greasy whispers of Jim Morrison or one's fellow inmates from the cave once having surfaced to the light.

When contemplating dusk certain things come to mind there's the dawn to dusk features at the drive-in where you wish they had A&W window service but in addition to drive in-ins the owl of Minerva comes to mind for she takes flight only at dusk because wisdom somehow is the bright light of the dark remembering that we all live in Plato's cave far from the sun also intruding in my thoughts quite unexpectedly the French expression L'heure entre chien et loup making me think how we distinguish tell the difference between friend and foe fact and fiction or maybe between fact and fearfulness and just then I wonder whether it's undoubtedly true that the forest is where foreign begins because to live on the edge of the woods is in itself a great feat calling to mind the miracle of clearing felling trees and burning the stumps turning the earth to the plow hewing and carrying to the end of days excep...

Cropsey on natural slavery Cropsey wore street clothes and changed into a blue pinstripe suit in his office before giving his lectures.  He kept his socks in the bottom drawer of his desk.  On top of his steel filing cabinet , which contained Leo Strauss' private papers,  was an 18th Century leather bound folio volume from Pierre Bayle's  Dictionary , which contained Leo Strauss' private papers.  I don't think these smelled of socks.  The Bayle volume contained Bayle's article on Spinoza.  Cropsey espoused his own brand of scepticism, so the Bayle was not surprising, nor was his reluctance to let non-Straussians peruse Strauss' correspondence.  Cropsey had us read Aristotle's  Politics , Plato's  Meno , and  Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology . The translation we used for Aristotle's  Politics  was translated by Straussian Carnes Lord--we called it the Lord edition.  One of the essay questions Cropsey set ...

Everyone of a certain generation knows the Life cereal television commercial, in which Mikey, who hates everything, seems to relish Life cereal, so that must mean it's good. I wonder whether the Mikey Likes It commercial was an early form of the Debbie Proof ?  And what is the Debbie Proof , you ask?  A retired professor friend of mine recently remarked upon a curious feature of articles by journalist and amateur sociologist James Fallows, published in the The Atlantic's Politics & Policies Daily, which the magazine describes as "a roundup of ideas and events in American politics." The Fallows on how America is already becoming great again Fallows is in  the habit of invoking the name of his wife Deb when punctuating his own political opinions.  Just as with Mikey in the Life cereal commercial, if Deb agrees or nods approvingly or is in any sympathetic or supportive, Fallows must be right! In the case of Fallows' recent contribution to The A...