I continue to deal with my moods.  Yesterday Eileen and Barb gently urged me to join them a beach trip despite the fact that I had been saying I wasn’t going to go.

Finally my better self won out and I joined them, grateful that they had thought to reinvite me just before they left.

I sat on the beach and read MIcheal Grant’s introduction to his Cicero: Selected Works. Cicero seems to be an antidote to Facebooger for me. At least all the unthinking hate, ignorance and reductivism anyway.

I’ll try not to bore you too much with insights from Cicero. But Grant says that Cicero’s insight that “virtue joins [humans] to God” can be boiled down to two concepts:

“all human beings, however humble, must count for something, must have some inherent value in themselves”

“secondly, this spark of divinity supplies an unbreakable bond of kinship between one [human] and another, irrespective of state, race, or caste, in a universal Brotherhood of [Humans].” Michael Grant, introduction to Cicero: Selected Works p 12

Writing in 1958, Grant does not neglect to mention Cicero’s attitude toward slaves in a footnote to this passage saying that while Cicero accepted slavery as a societal institution he worked toward humane treatment of them.

Probation May Sound Light, but Punishments Can Land Hard – The New York Time

This is a long sad story illustrating how bad some of our law are.

Northern Ireland Town Embraces Beckett Festival – The New York Times

Yay Beckett!