Month: September 2003
Confucius and the hermits
Two anecdotes from the historian Szma Ch’ien about Confucius: A father and son were ploughing a field when Confucius passed by with his disciples. A disci...
Justice II
Balancing an offense to the good cannot be achieved by human contrivance because offense itself is a human contrivance. We “take” offense. We “...
Simplicity II
Attempts at simplicity are rejections of culture. They are more subversive than words. To the ancient hermits, voluntary simplicity could not be pursued in the ...
Simplicity
Voluntary simplicity implies that we choose to give up consuming so much and possessing so much. Of course we never really possess or consume anything: we occup...
“Roadkill”
As urban and suburban boundaries expand and destroy habitat, more and more animals are killed by motorists. There is a special anguish to this form of death bec...