[…]the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.                                                                          ..read more

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse u ..read more

Note to my readers: I am putting up this post today in honor and memory of my father, who was born three days from now in 1910, on the Fourteenth of March — or “the Mourteenth of Farch,” as he always liked jokingly to put it. “A place for everything and everything in its place.” That is an old saying. My father sometimes used it to encourage my brother and me to put his tools away where they belonged when we were done with them. Once we finished using any of those tools, we were to put them back in his toolbox, our garage, our closets, or other storage spaces he and my mother had built or des ..read more

Not without reason does modern monopolistic capitalism support the National Socialist and fascist reaction. This reaction is to help beat down any resistance of the working masses, in order to set up a realm of industrial serfdom in which productive man is to be regarded merely as an economic automaton without any influence whatsoever on the course and character of economic and social conditions. This Caesarean madness stops at no barrier. Without compunction it rides rough shod over those achievements of the past which have all too often had to be purchased with the heart’s blood of the peop ..read more

Dwellings are places to dwell, habitations to inhabit. The two words, ‘dwellings’ and ‘habitations,’ mean the same thing. Accordingly, I could have made the subtitle to this piece “Crafting Habits for Inhabiting Habitations.” As a matter of fact, that — “Crafting Habits for Inhabiting Habitations” —  was one version of the title for this post that I at one point crafted for it. Crafting and then recrafting titles, as well as everything else that I write — just as I have been busy for quite a while writing, then rewriting again and again, this first section of this very post —  have b ..read more

A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people, primarily among craftsmen. But just as the artisan class encompassed the worlds of peasants, sailors, and city dwellers in the various stages of their economic and technical developments, there is a great divergence of concepts in which their experiences are reflected.                                        — Walter Benjamin[1] The sort of storytelling t ..read more

While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying of Yes to oneself, slave-morality begins by saying No to an “outside,” to an “other,” to a “not-oneself”: and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the evaluating glance — this necessary looking elsewhere instead of back upon oneself —  just belongs to resentment: in order to arise, slave-morality always needs a counter- and outer-world; put psychologically, it needs external stimulation in order to act at all — its fundamental action is reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble way of evaluating: it acts and gr ..read more

While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying of Yes to oneself, slave-morality begins by saying No to an “outside,” to an “other,” to a “not-oneself”: and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the evaluating glance — this necessary looking elsewhere instead of back upon oneself —  just belongs to resentment: in order to arise, slave-morality always needs a counter- and outer-world; put psychologically, it needs external stimulation in order to act at all — its fundamental action is reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble way of evaluating: it acts and gr ..read more

According to The Online Etymology Dictionary, beginning around the start of thirteenth century of the Common Era the verb blame meant “to find fault with” someone or something, as opposed to praising or commending that person or thing. Around a century later, however, the verb blame came to mean "lay responsibility on for something deemed wrong." The same entry for the verb blame also goes on to tell us that the roots of that word eventually trace back to the Late Latin word blasphemare, meaning literally "to blaspheme,” that is, “ ‘to speak lightly or amiss of God or sacred thi ..read more

In Judaism, we have a concept called free-floating hatred. That human beings are prone to project outwards with blame. When they’ve grown up in societies where “the other” is somehow bad and at fault for your suffering, they will go down that lane, because it is a natural human fault. And that’s, I think, why it’s so important to really understand oneself.                                          ..read more