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Sunbeams

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

Joseph Baretti

The Greater Good

Peter Singer On How To Live An Ethical Life

There are gradations of certainty about animal suffering. It’s very clear that chimps feel pain, and equally clear that plants don’t. We can say with reasonable confidence that all vertebrates suffer, because they respond to stimuli in the same way that humans do when we are in pain. With invertebrates, it’s harder to know, although certainly they can be intelligent. Octopuses, for example, have shown remarkable abilities to solve novel problems. So I assume they are conscious and therefore can suffer.

Just Shoot Me

My father, as he approaches death, never speaks about it, but I know he’s thought the matter through and wants to avoid a lingering, painful end. I’m sure of this because of the pills I found in his closet.

God’s Day

Still, there is one day in the year when I go plumb God-happy. It’s a made-up holiday pulled randomly from the calendar, as far away from the retail conspirators and their chocolate bunnies and sawed-off pine trees as I can get; a twenty-four-hour period of gratitude, humility, and atonement I call “God’s Day.”

Seventy-Two Labors

Even though the butcher section was in the back, I could smell animal flesh when I came through the doors, the faint stench that leaked through the plastic wrap and rose above the ammonia smell of the floors.

Sunbeams

One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our Founding Fathers used in the struggle for independence.

Charles Austin Beard

Sunbeams

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Czeslaw Milosz

The Saint, The Murderer, All Of It

Li-Young Lee’s Poetry Of Reconciliation

I believe the only possible ethical consciousness is one that accounts for the whole human being, that doesn’t leave any of it out — and this is precisely what poetry can achieve. On a social scale, this would be a government that accounts for all of its population — the poor, the rich, women, men, children, old people, black, white. Poetry is a way to integrate all of who we are: the saint, the murderer, all of it. By this, I don’t mean to suggest that we give the murderer free rein, but we have to account for that aspect of human psychology and understand it, not just push it aside.

Paradise Found

Christ embodied and lived the sum total of what I’ve learned in life, which is that the truth about things is hidden, it is small, and it is scorned and mocked by the world. Out of this poverty and want, this failure and humiliation, he created a temple “not made by human hands” to fulfill the deepest desire of every human heart, which is not to be so eternally, everlastingly alone.