Six Mile Wednesday
Tuesday Eight mile walk
Monday Six Mile COLD
Sunday Morning Walk
Long Saturday Walk
Felt the need to break 400 miles for the year so walked 11 today.
Six mile Friday
a KL moment?
Who will make this moment for our leaders?
From Act 3, Scene 4:
Tony Judt on the Plague
It does not follow from this that the plagues that humankind brings down upon itself are “natural” or unavoidable. But assigning responsibility for them—and thus preventing them in the future—may not be an easy matter. And with Hannah Arendt we have been introduced to a further complication: the notion of the “banality of evil” (a formulation that Camus himself would probably have taken care to avoid), the idea that unspeakable crimes can be committed by very unremarkable men with clear consciences.6
These are now commonplaces of moral and historical debate. But Albert Camus came to them first, in his own words, with an originality of perspective and intuition that eluded almost all his contemporaries. That is what they found so disconcerting in his writing. Camus was a moralist who unhesitatingly distinguished good from evil but abstained from condemning human frailty. He was a student of the “absurd” who refused to give in to necessity.7 He was a public man of action who insisted that all truly important questions came down to individual acts of kindness and goodness. And, like Tarrou, he was a believer in absolute truths who accepted the limits of the possible: “Other men will make history…. All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims—and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.”
Six mile Thursday Walk
Listening to my favorite book from high school: The Plague by Albert Camus.
This quote:
“I’ll ask the government for orders.”
When Rieux next met Castel, the prefect’s remark was still rankling.
“Orders!” he said scornfully. “When what’s needed is imagination.”
Albert Camus, The Plague (NY: Modern Library, 1948), 59.
The case for the nation
The book opens with this quote:
Nations reel and stagger on their way; they
make hideous mistakes; the commit frightful
wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.
And shall we not best guide humanity by
telling the truth about all this, so far as the
truth is ascertainable?
—W.E.B. Dubois,
The Propaganda of History, 1935
If I had a class right now, I’d like to argue over this quote from scholar Yael Tamir:
“The liberal tradition, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection, and choice, and the national tradition, with is emphasis on belonging, loyalty, and solidarity, although generally seen as mutually exclusive, can indeed accommodate one another.” p.130
The second to last paragraph of the book is money, too:
“In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” p. 137
