Setting Up The Scene: A Fight

Misè-en-scene of a too comfortable relationship:

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At Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library, beneath the colored dome, we fought; because we were tired and travel-weary, more comfortable with our ordinary looks and automobiles, than here, in this constant going and coming.

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Flash Fiction: Laundry

When you appeared to me one night as a heap of laundry ...

Looking up from underwater . . . 

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Once, I woke up in the middle of the night, warm beneath the covering, and I thought you were there, on my bedroom floor, your face resting on my naked foot. So, I called out your name but you didn’t reply. "Hey," I said again. But, nothing. Remained. And then I realized, after a moment, no one was in the room. I was alone. You were only an apparition. Like when I visited Georgette in her calloused age, I washed her tired calloused feet with hard, soapy water and she thought I was George, her son. The pain for me is more acute, because I know I am alone. More alive. But alone. I drift back to sleep. In the morning I see the laundry haphazardly arranged at the edge of my bed. And I realize it was the heap of clothes that I thought was you, come to comfort me.

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image source: ohaytv

Quote on Empathy

On Walking in Someone Else's Shoes:

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"There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths) and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it."

J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
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Quotation: Walker Percy on Bourbon Drinking

Bourbon, Neat

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth — all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic.

Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, "Bourbon", 1991

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Lesson Plan: World's Most Valuable Thing

See the end of this post for a
printable version of the World's Most Value Thing.

It's very simple to use this game designed by the folks at The Philosopher's Magazine. A few years back they did an issue devoted to children and philosophy. The issue has a game a teacher can organize with their students called "The World's Most Valuable Thing."
    I provided a scanned image of the handout above you can use, or if you are feeling creative you can use your own handout with your own world's most valuable things.
The rules are simple (click the link to read more):

Lesson Plan: An Example of Teaching Poetic Tone in the Classroom (with William Blake's "London" and "Jerusalem")

Class objective:  To continue the theme of Poetic tone by using examples from film and the poetry of William Blake.

The following class can be tailored to fit a high school language arts course or a college Introduction to Literature, or British Literature section.

Philosophy Thought Experiment: Nietzsche's Allegory of the Demon

Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous articulation of eternal recurrence of the same is imagined as a thought experiment.
The question Nietzsche poses is, ‘Would you live this life over again under the same conditions?’
After reading the quote, think of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day and the allegory makes more sense.

 

Here is an excerpt from the text:

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, s.341

translated by Walter Kaufmann

Source: Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Random House, 1974. Print.

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image source: fractal ontology