Before Herodotus

Time measured by days, nights, moons, seasons-- leather, saddle, boots, spear of the hunter, necklace of pointed teeth, flower petals cast in the burial mound.

Rediscovery

Some require scientific proof for acceptance of what is deemed real; others find the potential for metaphor to direct a vision of understanding, one which holds within the framework of language a perception of truth beyond that which can be weighed and measured, to be more intellectually satisfying.

Each perspective has power, and both demand more than subjective emotion.

Virtue and The Good

Ideas flow throughout culture over time; some run dry, others permeate the social and cultural strata.

If what the philosophers say is true, happiness is a life of virtue according to reason.  Its pursuit engages the spiritual faculties, which are Reason and Free Will.  The Good being self-evident, all else is illusion, delusion, vanity, pride, conceit-- obstacles to the quest.



Phenomena

Yellow and white balconies on apartment buildings, orange tile roofs, red and white smokestacks trailing light gray smoke into morning clouds through beads of condensation on the windows-- construction cranes rising beyond stone bridges built four hundred years in the past.

Wildflowers in early spring blur down the line, suggesting possibilities of who we are and how we live.  All these things comprise, with all things, our being and reality, the lives we burden with name brands and ideologies, information useful and trivial, personalities and problems of people we will never meet, seen every day in combinations of word and image, reportage and commentary and endless opinion, much of it pointless.

Transmission

The train leaves every morning for Berlin.  Look through the eyes of the new country at the old.

Every laugh, every cry, conveys personal meaning in any language.  Say too much and never say enough.

Reasoning

Philosophy turns on self-knowledge.  Who are we?  How do we live?  These are fundamental questions-- who has time for them, or interest?

Art that reaches beyond the transient and impermanent has an existential purpose.  It breaks ground, suggests possibilities, suggests permanent things. 



Landscape

Everywhere you look consciousness fragments into separate and distinct perceptions-- Hotel-- Restaurant-- Bar-- Time-- Distance-- Voices-- Music--

In a hotel room in Prague children leap into a Greek sea, drug cartels battle police and thousands are killed, ideas about "leadership" are cast about, Internet romances influence elections, diamonds are sold to spite family members.