"As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism." - Henry David Thoreau
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Random Thoughts - Thomas Sowell, always on point...
Forgot how much I enjoy reading the common sense of Thomas Sowell:
"To me, all students are the same. I treat them all the same and hold them all to the same standards." The next semester there was an organized boycott of my classes by foreign students. When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination."
Monday, February 17, 2014
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Should we all take notes of our lives?
"Regarding the note-taking, you might ask, "Isn't it enough just to live it? Why write it down?" The answers there are human:To keep it: to capture your time in history as it happened. To remind yourself it's real"
Further on, Noonan advances the idea that people leave their papers behind to remind future readers that 'they were here - and, I guess, successful enough that someone may care.
"I was alive—this is proof," and, "I was successful—here is the evidence."For those of us not so successful or famous, what do we leave behind? We've lived our own history. Most of us never took notes - let alone had someone else take them about our lives. We live with the memories of what we 'lived', what we witnessed, what we felt. How different is our memory of those events compared to the reality of it? Has time washed away some of the questionable aspects or embellished them beyond what the notes would have supported?
Many, many people keep journals. I envy them. I haven't the discipline to keep one up-to-date.
But how many of us find our way into someone else's notes or journals - as the Clinton's did?Obviously our actions aren't as important as the leader of the free world, but it does give you pause. Maybe we should all live our lives as if someone IS taking notes. [enter religious thoughts here]
Sunday, February 09, 2014
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)