Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Beyond a mundane declaration of befuddlement, it is also the title of a novel by Joseph Heller — his second novel published some 13 years after the successful first one that most people remember him by: Catch-22. It lacks the surrealism of the first novel; the absurdity of tragic events unfolding distinguishable from the logical and sequential manner in which we see the world, […]
What is it about the ascription of such a word, that there can be a direct correlation or, if taken in a different context, some mere connection but no causality? We can say of a person, “He is responsible for X”, and yet never have directly encountered X or (if a person) never even have met X. Thus of monsters and thugs throughout history, for instance, we might say that “Stalin was responsible for 20 million deaths, […]
The trailing ellipsis establishes a pause for reflection, and the finality of three periods for an emphasis upon the irreversible nature of the statement. “And then” connotes that something preceded – a lifetime of activities, a century or less of human historicity involving birth, growth, work, struggles, etc. – existed before the conclusion of the life. The “we are” slice of the sentence implies two additional variables: the universality of involvement – an event that excludes no one […]
How do we come to learn how to do it? Certainly, we come across certain eccentric individuals who defy every conventional norm, and somehow manage to appear as if they have done what otherwise we recognize as not having been completed. Have you ever come across someone who just isn’t “quite right” – such that, when you ask a question, the tangents that flood forth and the meandering thought processes make it an arbitrary conclusion as to whether it was the specific question asked that prompted the incommensurate response, or just the mere fact of a tonal posit of a question-like query that compelled a verbal reaction, even if it has nothing to do with the substance of the question itself? […]
We enter into this impervious universe in such a state. Yes, yes – there are parents surrounding, love embracing and doctors, nurses and hospital attendants with smiling faces and all of that; but being alone is conceptually distinct from loneliness, and one can be surrounded by a multitude of social acquaintances, family members and close and distant relatives, and still bear the weight of the latter, and yet know throughout that one is nevertheless alone in this world. […]
It is rare for the individual to accept constructive criticism; rarer still, to invite and welcome it in any form, whether destructive, constructive or otherwise characterized as “positive”, “negative” or “neutral”. The fact is that few of us accept any form of it at all, and quickly respond with the rebuttal: “It’s not constructive”. But why does it need to be? […]
It is an interesting device. We can try and project back to a time of its non-existence, or at least when not every household owned one. What could it have been like? Where the hour was guessed at by the position of the sun – or was that not even part of the thought process? Did the sun, dawn, dusk and twilight merely present a foreboding for a different paradigm? […]
Where are they? Beyond Platonic Forms and heavenly orbs where the golden dust sparingly sprinkled from the wings of angels in flight, do perfect lives exist and, if so, where? We can suspend disbelief and fantasize of celebrities and the lives of Wall Street wolves with their mansions, beautiful bodies and facial grimaces so tightened by plastic surgery as to make smiling an exertion of monumental phenomena; but, in the end, we all realize that the pinnacle of human achievement is but another endeavor of human fallacy, and never approaching the omniscience of an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover. […]