White air cuts the skin

The gentle breeze is sharp

But in that small town

By that round lake

There is a heart

It beats bold and red

The blood is hot and good

My past, resides there.

My life and future are elsewhere.

But a piece of me is always there

and I anticipate the journey.

The great thing about living on the semester system is that despite a great deal of work during the long semester, long breaks are the reward. After a four day grading binge, I entered my last grades last night. And until January 20, my life is my life. I spent the day reading, finishing a book , starting another,  buying a few more, going for a walk, cleaning my room and organizing papers, and relaxing with some glasses of wine. 

Tomorrow I begin a trip to Minnesota, my home. After taking a bus from Chicago to Minneapolis and meeting my parents, I’m taking my old jeep up to Duluth to stay with a friend for a night. Then it is off to Bemidji, my Jerusalem (to put it strongly). There, I will stay with a professor and her family (she is a good friend as well) and see many of my old mentors during the annual faculty Christmas party. I hope to see many other friends as well, either at coffee or at one of the few remaining bars.

It will be wonderful to leave the city and head up to the northwoods where the air is clean and the sky is big and clear. Frozen water, pine forests covered in snow, the Mississippi, Lake Superior, and Paul Bunyan.  It will be cold, but it will be beautiful. 

For the few people who read this, I am slowly taking back up the practice of writing and I hope that this blog becomes more active and frequented in the future.  I was about to say that my posts will drop off during the break, but there are so few posts as it stands that that is probably not true 🙂 I am looking forward to my trip, and to the future in general. Many exciting things are afoot.  More later.

Ah, grading papers. My midnight companion. I am not hating it tonight as much as usual. I am actually enjoying it. However, I’m not writing any comments tonight. I’ll save those for the students who ask for them this time; this is the end of the semester and so few students will seek them anyway. And with over 120 6 page papers, I think 720 pages of reading is enough work.

The fire changes. A fire is never the same from one instant to the next. It is hard to tell if the fire has a form even in an instant. Is it entirely ephemeral? Or does one lick of a flame definitely exist, if just for a second?

All of life is a fire. Nothing stays the same, although some licks move so slowly, it looks as though they are permanent structures. Mount Everest, though, is an object in motion. It rises up, and it will sink down.   Nothing is certain, except in the instant.

I am feeling the need to write, although I do not have much to write about today. Nothing terribly exciting at least. So this will likely be an unexciting post.

The semester’s end draws near. This has been a hectic semester. I always felt like I was running behind in work, despite working as much as I could before my brain gives up on me. 

However, it has been a good semester for other reasons. I have been making some new friends, and watching older friendships change. One new friend in particular has amazing promise. She is the sort where hours and hours dissolve in a moment because of a great chemistry in personalities and conversation. I think this is the sort of friendship that Aristotle might describe as the “excellent type,” where the person is not valued simply for pleasure, but because the friendship assists in the improvement of my character.

I just encountered this notice on my computer: NVidia Firewall is detected on my computer, which is known for system and application crashes, and high CPU usage. 

This is intersting, because system crashes and high CPU usage are precisely the things that have chronically affected my computer. If I’m on the computer for a long time, it can happen repeatedly within the same day.  I’ve had this computer for 2.5 years. 

I put my computer together myself, without really knowing what I was doing. I couldn’t identify the problem; nor could my computer savvy friend or the computer repairshop down the street. This might be the medicine. Now, I just have to find the software and blammo! Maybe that will solve the problem. Of course, maybe not.

Does ‘living in the moment’ take practice? It is a skill or an art? Something that improves as you repeat the activity and reflect upon the strengths and weaknesses of your particular art of ‘living in the moment?’ Is there a skill set in ‘living in the moment?’

Having students that are older than myself in a philosophy class is usually not a problem. So far, it has never been a problem; perhaps I have been lucky in that they have all been humble enough to give me the floor. But occasionally, they do choose to argue against me, and sometimes they teach me something wonderful. I am happy with myself that, despite being a philosophy teacher, I can still recognize when a student is more knowledgable about philosophy than I am. 

(This applies to my previous post; the student mentioned there is older than myself. )

We are studying Aristotle’s Ethics in my ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ class right this week. I always enjoy teaching it, and I think my students generally find him more worthwhile than most of our philosophers. 

Generally, I think that Aristotle would reject the notion that Happiness involves “living in the moment.” Happiness is a result of living a full and complete life, and that one cannot ‘have happiness’ in one moment and not in the next. However, an older student of mine made a point that, although doesn’t change my mind about Aristotle says in general, calls for a modification. 

Much of Aristotle’s  seems to demand reflection of the past and planning of the future. But I have perhaps been neglecting the proper place of absorbing those experiences of the present as well. To soak in a moment, and direct one’s consciousness only on the details of that second is a type of reflection as well. Furthermore, it is not just one type among many, but a special type. Those sensations of the immediate/present strike us more vividly than any memory or prediction ever can. And with the strength of the sensation, a type of experience becomes available that would not be available in memory or prediction. 

I believe Aristotle would still reject the notion that happiness is merely living in the moment. However, living in the moment might be something that I (I don’t know about most Aristotelians, or Aristotle himself) might be underappreciating as a good that heavily contributes to the enhancement of the chief good. With that, we have more vivid memories to reflect back upon. 

When I joined the Marine Corps, one of the motivating factors was that, when I am old and looking back on my life, will I have appreciated my life more or less by joining or not joining? I thought that certainly, I would be happier in my reflections if I joined. And I am. That period of my life was not a waste.  That experience was vivid and lively, constantly in motion.

But what about life now? And what about the direction in which I am going? Will I look back on this and feel satisfied? Am I living my life as vividly as I ought to? Or am I feeling constantly rushed? Constantly anticipating and planning for the next moment? Perhaps I am. I have felt so harried of late. Despite the fulfillment I feel in teaching philosophy, something about life seems empty and soulless…like Bell’s Brewery’s ‘Hopsolution.’

I love tying philosophy in with beer.

Sloth is my worst sin.

My students and I were in a discussion about evil. More specifically, we were looking at the well-worn question of whether or not morality is dependent on God’s existence or not. In order to answer the question, we looked at the different levels of morality: absolute morality, divine morality, human morality, and culture/government morality. 

One part of the discussion involves whether or not an action can be moral if it does not involve anyone other than one’s self, ie, if a person is not violating anyone else’s rights, can an act still be moral or immoral. An answer of ‘yes’ implies that one believes morality exists on a higher level than culture/government, and possibly human as well. 

Many of my students seemed annoyed that I would suggest something like ‘sloth’ or masturbation would be considered immoral. The concept did not make any sense to them, as far as I could see.

But classifying sloth as a type of immoral behavior makes sense. It is an indulgence that prohibits the “sinner” (although I would only use this word metaphorically) from reaching good, excellent goals. And when those goals are concerned with the ever-growing advancement of humanity and a benevolent peace, ought not those things be considered moral? And self-growth is always a good that could be used for the good of humanity, or at least a larger community.

But, suppose an aspiring evil tyrant were “slothful.” Would this be a sin, since his goals are counter to the goals of humanity? In one sense, yes, but in another, no. It is not a sin against humanity for the evil tyrant to be slothful. But, it is counter to his own goals, and so it is sinful for his self. Being infected with sloth for an evil person  (in this case meaning someone who strives against the goods of humanity) is the same as it is for a good person.