Talking In My Sleep

 [Posted on Facebook, June 17, 2018]   "Blackbird singin' in the dead of night ..."   That's my song for the day, only I composed my own line, with apologies to McCartney, "Bobolink singin' on the compost pile."   It pretty much works.   Try it.   There's that extra syllable in "Bobolink" but it's easily incorporated. I sat weeding the garden this morning while the bobolink serenaded me from atop the nearby compost heap, blurting his character istic song, reminiscent of R2D2 computing the answer to a posed problem.   The reason that kinda thing makes hearts flutter around here is that, through some intentional machinations, we set out to attract bobolinks to our very property.   Bobolinks are meadow birds – they like wide expanses of open grassland, and of course they hate it when they go to all the trouble to construct their ground nest of grass and soft leaves and then some tractor comes along and makes hay out of the en...

When he who hears doesn’t know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks doesn’t know what he himself means – that is philosophy.   -  Voltaire I mostly avoided philosophy in college.  It would be years before any formal study of the field caught my interest.    I did take one course my freshman year in which we were assigned The Myth of Sisyphus , the Greek legend, as interpreted by Albert Camus.   The central figure rolls a heavy rock up a hill, repeatedly, only to have it roll back down each time.  Sisyphus is condemned to repeating the cycle for all eternity.  I read the central story and judged it to be completely pointless, blithely unaware that this determination was an intellectually valid viewpoint.   My conclusion was couched not in any deep contemplation of Camus’ eisegesis but rested instead upon the relative unimportance of academics to me at the time.   My attention focused more keenly on sports, ...