To look with fresh eyes at the dull but consummated catastrophe

Go and sit in an Epicurean garden and fix on the idea that perhaps the well-lived life is not examined and measured to the infinitesimal, but consumed down to the marrow. Neither an original nor a profound thought, but better than a poke in the eye perhaps. Better than a cough in the mouth too.

Different horses for different courses, obviously. Perhaps Diogenes, with his discarded cup and idolized child, is more to your liking. Or one of the systematizing Germans, the old ones who liked and still believed categories could be like walls. An Estonian who could say, in his doggerel accent “I’m pickled pink and I got nowhere to go but my shrink and nothing to show for it but my paycheck.” I am ecumenical. If I occupy a mind that is delaminating, I feel the pull of one school that might pull me from the deep immense. If I am in self-improvement mode, having grabbed and pulled the thorn with time to spare for counting shekels, then I may construct and cross conceptual bridges of a different order.

“Love of wisdom” is not the only loosely structured vocation built from a long line of plastic neologisms. Chief best most primary modern bequeather of course wears the uniform. Collateral damage. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Smart bombs. We are of course now far afield of the garden. It turns out all the fructifying rain falls only in America. Of course, that damned phrase, I say it so often it’s like a hiccup.

And yes but it was my best thinking that got me here. Guilty as charged. I have been absent but not idle.