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Quote of the day
“It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power. Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of...
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Quote of the day
“Ideologies are harmless, uncritical and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical...
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Quote of the day
“We are now again in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an ‘ideology’. At the moment, the Liberal philosophy is felt by many to be too tame and middle-aged: the idealistic...
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Quote of the day
“Some kind of philosophy is a necessity to all but the most thoughtless, and in the absence of knowledge it is almost sure to be a silly philosophy. The result of this is that the human race becomes...
View ArticleWind in the tall grasses
Today I will write about the wind in the tall grasses. Lost, immaterial, like our souls, Just a passage from one place to another. Just air. Just breath. Soft stalks undulating. It’s ballet. Beautiful...
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Quote of the day
“Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts...
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Quote of the day
On sex education: “There is no sound reason, of any sort or kind, for concealing facts when talking to children. Their questions should be answered and their curiosity satisfied in exactly the same...
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Things you can observe at 7 a.m.
I watched blackbirds today. I couldn’t sleep. Early at dawn I watched a parent feed her chick. The older one was dark – as burdens darken us; the younger pale, unknowing, made a fuss. Peck, peck, they...
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Podge and his book from the sky – A fable
Once upon a time there was a badger. We’ll call him Podge, because that’s what his friends called him. Podge was an intrepid and adamant little badger and he liked to roam the neighborhood at length,...
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The Angler
He didn’t mind the waiting. In fact, that was the best part. He was there for the wait. He did have qualms about impaling the worms, though. That much is true. But he’d shrug it off: ‘If I don’t get...
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Children saying scary things
My daughter (10), elated that she got into the class she wanted and avoided the all-girls class: ‘All-girls classes suck!’ Me, naively: ‘Why?’ My studious 10-year-old: ‘Because they’d be all prissy...
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The mental health argument
This is probably not going to be a popular post. Over at the Olympics, Simone Biles has withdrawn from the gymnastics team event invoking “mental issues” and everybody is applauding her “courage”. I...
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Quote of the day
“Uniformity in the opinions expressed by teachers is not only not to be sought, but is, if possible, to be avoided, since diversity of opinion among preceptors is essential to any sound education. No...
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Best of Romania 2021
“It is said that some Bolsheviks, deeming that a love based on choice and exclusivity was only a prejudice infiltrated by the bourgeois spirit, tried to abolish it, treating love as an instinct, an...
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What language do you dream in?
The brain is a funny thing. And funny things happen when your brain goes on vacation. I consider myself bilingual (Romanian and English) and I’ve been living in Germany for more than 15 years now, but...
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I feed on the unspoken
You call it this, I call it that, the thingness of a thing is beyond our babbles labels come and go what is truly real is quiet and dark its depths crushing and warm and full of moisture like the...
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Discoveries on Via Transilvanica
Here comes the final act of my adventures through the ancestral hamlets of Cernei Mountains (S-W Romania) this summer, summarized in a travel article slated to appear on liternet.ro on October 11:...
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Freedom
Night was falling in the coppice-wood Each strand of light threadbare and bluish Thinned out into mystery The path darkened, populated by shadows The clock in the church tower struck The hour of the...
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The Levee
a man, a dog and the pond at the bottom of the levee: brown reeds, an egret and a few muted gulls, scattered. winter lurking. a man stopping, crouching, gazing into the distance, holding on to that...
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Quote of the day – A possible link between Romania’s COVID disaster and its...
“Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. (…) Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major...
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