Ink Lake

Wisdom

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
— Goethe

 

“Went to the prom - wore the fly blue rental. Got six girlies in my Lincoln Continental.”
— Beastie Boys

God Give Me Strength

Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens before a sold-out crowd in Toronto, debated the proposition that religion is a force for good in the world.

Fomer P.M. (and new-minted Catholic) Blair should be thankful Hitchens became an American, and never had to debate with him for his supper.

I’m glad to see Hitchens, who is battling esophageal cancer, was hairless, but otherwise looked in pretty good shape. In any event, he pretty much wiped the floor with Blair.

Witch-doctor, former-Gov. Huckabee, perhaps you’d like to give it a go? I know Oxford isn’t Harvard.

The whole debate can be heard here. I strongly recommend it.

My Outlook On Life, Part 2

A Little Tooth by Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all

over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

I first saw this poem while riding the subway. The MTA picked it as a part of their Poetry In Motion program. Each poem stays up for a few months, before another takes its place.

Clyde Haberman of the Times, a fellow fan of the poem, spoke to the author, back in 2007, as “A Little Tooth”’s run was drawing to a close.

Lux, who teaches poetry at Georgia Tech said, “I’ve gotten more feedback on that poem than I’ve had on any other,”

Haberman continues,

He wrote it after his daughter, Claudia, was born. She is now 19, a student at Sarah Lawrence. Until she noticed the poem while riding the subway and told him about it, he didn’t know he had been chosen.

Don’t take everything about it literally, Mr. Lux said. “Only some of that stuff came true — about cretins and dolts and sweet talkers on their way to jail,” he said.

Just give her time, we said unhelpfully.

“Yeah,” Mr. Lux said with a laugh, “give her time.”

My Outlook On Life, Part 1, here.

My Outlook On Life, Part 1

I’m going to make this a 3-parter. One a day. Here is # 1.

 

Fallen from Sascha Geddert on Vimeo.

As a reader on Sullivan, said,

This short film is the best explanation of the nonbeliever’s viewpoint I’ve seen. It’s under just under four minutes and uses no words. When people ask me how I can be at peace without belief in god or an afterlife, now I can just show them Fallen and save myself a lot of time and effort.

Darn, I must have something in my eye…

Do You Kill The Fat Guy?

Imagine five people are tied to a train track, and a train is hurtling towards them. Next to you, is a lever which if pulled, will divert the train to another track. That track has only one person tied to it. You’ll save the five, but kill the one. Do you pull it?

Now, imagine a different scenario – you’re on a trestle above the track, with the five people facing the same certain death. Next to you, is an obese person, who if you push over the side, will land on the track, and stop the onrushing train – killing him, but saving the five. Do you give him the shove?

What if you didn’t have to physically push him, but could push a button to drop him over the side? How about if you could push the button from another room? How about if you could tell someone else to do it?

Does it matter to you if the people on the track were kids, or old people? How about the fat guy?

These questions are all part of something philosophers call the “trolley problem”. It was designed to help understand the nature, and source of, human morality. Do people of different genders, or cultures answer the same way? How about people of different ages?

Listen to a great discussion of this here (streaming), or download an MP3 podcast.