Small Talk (23)

aphorisms and short reflections

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everything is prayer, except work, which is penance







i have God as my witness, judge, jury and executioner. a devil's advocate.






die as if your life depended on it






granted, it was before my time, but politics used to be good bad theater. now it's just bad theater.






you're not getting the big picture if you ignore the fine print.






etymologically speaking, elegance is a privilege of the elect. you can understand a lot with this going both ways.







it's both humbling and annoying that i have no idea what my artistic process is, other than smoking a lot.






after many rejections from snobbish agents, and with the help of talented editors, God decided to self publish the book of nature. it was an instant success, despite its lack of a marketing plan. it was a worldbuilding masterpiece, successfully blending many genres and, in fact, inhabiting, and perhaps establishing, a category of its own. even the most conservative critics were impressed with how the characters came alive.






evil may prevail but good always avails







it is effectively illegal to apply the heuristic provided by Jesus of judging a tree by its fruit.






etymosophically speaking innocence and ignorance are the same word. which is why one should not translate the famous idiom as 'innocent as a dove' but rather 'guileless as a dove'. the holy spirit is not ignorant at all.







deep etymosophy: lazy and stupid are in fact opposites. to be stupid is to be forceful, to be lazy is to be pliable.









Jesus already redeemed us from original sin. now, if we are to follow him into resurrection and heaven, we must redeem ourselves from plagiarized ones. 







no one is beyond redemption, but it is beyond many.







i'm not gonna to make it. i'm gonna let it grow.









listen to a few, speak to even fewer. i'm not one of the few, and even less so of the fewer.








the wisdom of old age is no longer a given because it requires two conditions that the modern world no longer meets. first, there needs to be some merit or superiority in surviving to old age. currently, in the west at least, and more and more everywhere, surviving to old age takes no special intelligence, strength or even good genetics. most problems can be fixed, or papered over. and so, no wisdom gained by simple longevity. second, the world in which someone is born needs to be more or less the same as the one in which one reaches old age. this is no longer the case. any knowledge for navigating the world of the 1960s (or even the 1990s) is basically irrelevant on many levels to the world of today, because the world is so different in so many different ways. so wisdom must be constantly acquired, renewed, reviewed. it cannot just be settled as it was in a preindustrial society where change was very slow. things being what they are now, and coupled with the first condition, the wise old man is necessarily rarer, and in general, the old are just as unwise as the young, and generally less so, because less adaptable. ~ this reflection is a revised version of a comment on this post by my friend Francis Berger.






good fences, and only good fences, make good neighbors to love as yourself.

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