Anti-Luke 23:34

much social criticism would say:
'Father, reject them, for they know not what they do.'
or
'Father, reject them, for they know what they do.'

...signifying something.

There is the well-known soliloquy of Macbeth:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (Act V, Scene V, 20-31)

but most of us live as if the tale signified something.

ad hominem

having now found and read many of the known notes of those who lived and died above the tree line, I can say, with some real dismay, that few of these few had been able to find, or make, a clear way above the mountain peaks.

barbarians inside the gates?

inner or outer "barbarians", in the end we will reportedly learn how much we were.

the deepest question

do we in fact live our daily lives sub specie aeternitatis or sub specie mundi ?

Nietzsche's "errand into the wilderness"?

no. into civilization.

eulogy to monsters?

preparing for a conference where I am to read from Walden to Russians...

it is insightful to note that when Thoreau’s searching in nature was a “spiritual quest”, he did not fear meeting monsters, dragons, demons or tigers therein. that too was part of the disenchantment of the world. eulogy to monsters?

American politics

it is impossible to understand politics in the USA unless one recognizes that it is ~80-85% emotional, about 7-10% rational, with a needed buffer zone in between. this is based purely on my life-experience, and about 40 years of personal observation and reflection.

the cacangel of Nietzsche

on Nietzsche and Christianity...

not revivalist: devivalist
not evangel: cacangel
not evangelism: cacagelism
not evangelist: cacangelist

not the gospel, but the bad news.

late soviet to post-soviet Mo$cow

a visitor to what afterwards came to be recognized as having been the last years of the Soviet Union, if they had the potential in them, could see how the outer "unfreedom" in which the vast Russian majority lived in a kind of enforced solidarity (if with a necessary humor against the Soviet system and ideology) helped to build a kind of "inner freedom" (a common enough self-/socially conscious topic of Russian kitchen commiseration of those times) which gave an inner intensity, content and vitality which the more externally free "Western" travelers might discern (though often enough not) as visitors
with the transition from "the big village Moscow" of the "late Soviet period", to booming Mo$cow with its malls and billionaires, and all the variety of entertainments and activities which had formally not existed for most people in the USSR, the external freedoms and possibilities and activities, have meant that the average, passive Russian, who had a greater "inner life" by the force of necessity of social and living conditions in the past, is quite happily now able to live his or her inner life in relation to greater "outer freedoms".
only those for whom "the inner life" is a personal need (when not perhaps required by outer life), continue to evince the inner life more common in what I call the enforced monasticism of the Soviet times.