Logos

The virtue of the written word is its power of transmission across time and space.

The tongue asserts meaning and absurdity but briefly, while these letters express memory, ideas, description, instruction, imagination, and many of the vagaries of human thought over continents, over lifetimes and generations.

Human Nature

--to believe oneself above law, beyond criticism; to demand everything, produce nothing.

Accept no responsibility, act without restraint, and use any means to attain any self-centered end.

The Mask that Covers the Eyes

Ghosts of the living.  The persona, the mask, is the reality, and the self is unknown.

The persona becomes all, and the individual, the spirit, the soul, is cut adrift.

Lights

Some seek silence, solitude, reason, inspiration.  They are ready to act according to their best judgement.  They tend the ground they must tread.  Forces of history may touch them, or leave them to their ways.

The past may be darkness to some, light to others.

Passion Flowers

Our perceptions lose all subtlety, our apprehension and understanding of reality is numbed, degraded, stultified, and our days are made up of such relentless distraction and nuisance we see nothing.  Or nothing beyond our responsibilities or diversions.  Reason disintegrates in bedlam, and most are acclimated to nothing more substantial than transient and untrustworthy emotions.

The supremacy of emotion is everywhere visible.  It trumps a critical regard for facts; it trumps analytical assessment of our character, of our thoughts and actions.  The word "passion" is used far too often, as though it confers a kind of nobility to our pursuits, which may have nothing more than selfish and self-serving motivations.

Neuroscientists assert virtually all political belief is inextricably bound to parts of the brain associated solely with emotion.

And the brain is not the mind.

Timepiece II

To live in a timeless state of being.

To detach oneself from the mundane world of transient things and to live in the world of permanent things.

Transmission II

Culturally, one is engaged from an early age with a fully realized world view.

It is now likely that this world view encompasses postmodern perspectives which may be in opposition to traditional and historical cultural values.  One may not even be aware that those norms which comprise the latter perspective exist, or remain in existence as forces of history.