Mark Knopfler playing the guitar

The long views: art, friendship, love, the pursuit of understanding. We will always overstate our ridiculously brief moment in time: our bright individual dawn turning into this gloomy, threatening storm by this particular evening. But however it will go, the long views will remain: value is not determined by history but is independent, perpetual, eternal.

I did not plan for this

It all went horribly wrong before I even had formulated the mere concept of planning, of control - a perfect storm of circumstances and sensibility. But afterwards, setting the goals of loving and being loved, being needed, I did succeed. I became a person: a loving man being loved. So maybe some other paths would have been more glorious, but I somehow really doubt that... This will totally do.

The example of Keynes

He basically lived in the worst of times, with the worst of contrasts between his youth and his adulthood, leaping not like a swimmer into cleanness but into unspeakable filth and blood and despair. And he kept his faith, kept his energy, kept his optimism, fought with all his manifold weapons for civilization and peace. I am, we are, everyone basically is, much less gifted but that particular state of mind is not exclusive. 

Slouching towards Jerusalem

The corrosive effect of the ever increasingly liberalistic global capitalism is very hard to underestimate in these bleak times. The magical next quarter along with the mad, totally irrational belief in the invisible hand leading towards ever more inevitable environmental catastrophes, leading towards the ever more inevitable collapse. All this is so very logically accompanied with the relentless undermining of the old values, the old commonalities whether humanistic or religious. Only soulless, angry, resentful consumers left. National radicalism is the opium for people.

The shining city on a hill spewing sewage

The end of the American Dream - or at least the part of it that fought out of slavery and apartheid and rescued the Western civilization three times during the 20th century. The optimistic and forward looking part. Now transformed by robber capitalism, primitive fundamentalism and racial resentment into inward looking, toxic, raging shell of a once mighty Republic.