Live while you are alive
On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year-old Maryland boy named Rafi and his six-year-old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile from their suburban house. Their parents were fine with that: they’re part of the “free-range kids” movement, a national campaign to give children more independence so they can learn …
Continue reading ‘Children must be able to walk home alone’ »
The other day I asked a reader how he would characterize the Epicurus Blog. His answer was: “Humane” I was delighted. We live in a world that has become ever more polarized between a tiny, rich and grasping minority and a huge lumpenproletariat (of which I count myself a member) whose rights are being whittled …
Like Epicurus, Aristotle believed in the virtue of moderation in all things. Take, for instance, courage: too much can amount to recklessness, and too little in fearfulness. There is, he thought something pleasing about moderate behaviour. If you are faced with a crisis and seem to run away from making a decision about it, you lose …
There is no rest for the striver, the person who just has to “get on”, as my father called it. One goal reached and another emerges, and all the time the clock is ticking. In “Time”, by Eva Hoffman, the writer contrasts slow, “lived time” with her first experience of American time when she emigrated to …
“It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been …
