In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I am finished reading:
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens- I wanted to begin the year by finishing something and I found a copy of this short series of essays; a couple of them I recall reading in their original form in Vanity Fair.
Brief speculation on a number of subjects including religion, of course. My own personal favorites were his essay on the value of voice and his take on Nietzsche’s “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger” (which Hitchens speculates sounds more like Goethe than Nietzsche.
Analyzing the blues that I developed during that lousy seven days, I discovered that I felt cheated as well as disappointed. “Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.” I would have happily offered myself as an experimental subject for new drugs or new surgeries, partly of course in the hope that they might salvage me, but also on the Mann principle. And I didn’t even qualify for the adventure.
I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a stärker is to credit him for being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker...one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.
I am reading:
The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
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