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Looking Back
What should I do? Look forward, I think not. Forward is the end. I think back and what that entails is recollection and reminiscence. memories and the sisters regret and ruefulness. The present is in disarray, for the dust has not settled, just the eye of the storm crossing self-geography. I associate to a dim memory in sixth grade in which I wrote down the year 2000, for it was 1952. I imagined for a moment what it would be like to be 60, just for a moment. I shot ahead, I shot back to ’52 and I went on.…
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The Razor’s Edge
The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over: thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard. — KATHA UPANISHAD Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge was turned into a movie I saw decades ago, starring Gene Tierney, Ann Baxter, Tyrone Power and Herbert Marshall. It was not a memorable nor near great movie but it did have things in it that I remember. It’s the story of Larry Darrell, a man in search, experiencing a spiritual quest, much as Capra’sThe Lost Horizon reeked of a spiritual Shangra-La. I have not seen the Bill Murray version of…
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Blood Libel and All That Jazz
Impressions. Since Sarah Palin does not write her own books — nor credit the ghosts who do, I suppose her “Blood Libel” talk was composed by speechwriters. I also suppose that ignorance is usually surrounded by ignorance, the undereducated in league with the undereducated. Quite likely that team Palin had no idea about the loaded meaning of that term for Jews. And that is point one. Palin comes to us without historicity. She dwells in the present abandoned by cognition of the past. In short, she doesn’t know gradations of feelings or emotions. What drives her is pure unadulterated narcissism which…
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This Mobius Strip of Ifs – Introduction
This Mobius Strip of Ifs, a collection of essays by Mathias B. Freese, will be published later this year. Below is the book’s introduction written by Jane Holt Freese. We encourage reader comments and reactions. Happy New Year! Although we are passing ephemera, human lint on this planet in transit, it is a powerful and nourishing feeling for me to have passed long enough to have observed the passage of time and my place in it. Mathias B. Freese in “Spousal Interview.” This Möbius Strip of Ifs refers to a line in, “To Ms. Foley, with Gratitude.”The essay examines…