Category: philosophical counseling

• April 30, 2012

  Attention: attendere (L.), tenderness; attend: to turn one’s ear to, listen to

  I am writing half an hour before nightfall. Before I awoke on Sunday, a mosquito kept buzzing in my ear, reminding me of dear Emily’s buzzing Fly. I awoke with the dawn, the sun having made its case rather nonchalantly this morning. Around 7:20 a.m., the sun cast itself upon room and walls and trees…
• April 28, 2012

  ‘My sad smile corrects her’

  Joan’s PET scan came back negative. The doctors don’t know what the spot on her lung is. Maybe just a scar. Joan turned 89 the week before last. Today she said, “Eight-year-olds are such a marvel. They see and say so much.” We drank champagne on her birthday and, with her two sons and also…
• April 27, 2012

  Love as plenitude: A prelude

  Theodicy (Leibniz’s coinage) is a justification of the ways of God to man. To “justify the ways of God to man” was Milton’s project in Paradise Lost. This justification can seem urgent, and especially fraught, when one cannot deny the existence of evil but at the same time believes wholeheartedly in the existence of a benevolent,…
• April 26, 2012

  On Ajax’s becoming mad

  Overcome by rage, Ajax would have his revenge. He would steal upon the Greek camp, would bleed Odysseus alongside the other men who had had a hand in the scheme. Achilles had died and his armor was rightfully his–for who greater than he, what warrior more mighty and more deserving, what man nobler? Odysseus was…
• April 23, 2012

  To be is to be touched

  I can remember the presentations that guest speakers used to give to us second- and third-graders. The subject was the distinction between “good” and “bad” touches. By my recollection, there would have been red slashes over pictures of “inappropriate” touches–a man’s hand, say, en route to a young woman’s crotch–and circles around “good” touches like…