Another thought on Ephesians 6:12

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." — Paul to the believers at Ephesus.  

If I don't believe this, I will have few friends.  

If I do believe this, I will have few enemies. -WS

A thought on Ephesians 6:12

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." — Paul to the believers at Ephesus.  

This freighted comment seems to imply that all struggles with which we daily contend, be they between family, neighbors or even nations, are but mimics, stagecraft for a greater, more important struggle which is going on offstage. 

Perhaps Shakespeare was speaking of this when he said, in As You Like It:

All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players...

—WS

Music: "Chess drenched in perfume."

Plenty of genuine ideas exist in music, of course; they're just not what we mean by "ideas" in any non-musical sense. They express musical techniques and music's root mathematical structure, and exactly what they have to do with what we experience while listening is something no one has ever satisfactorily explained... . But these [techniques and mathematical structures] are ideas like the ideas in chess or math. They don't mean anything and have no purpose in and of themselves. It's no accident that child prodigies—with the skill of adults and the experience of children—appear in music, chess and math but never in poetry or philosophy... . What we experience in music is something else. Music stands, at last, as "evocative" — a word whose only other use is in advertisements for expensive perfume. Music is chess drenched with perfume. J. Bottum, "The Soundtracking of America," Atlantic Monthly, March 2000.

On the Novel as Experience

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have an experience. — Flannery O'Connor

Hold tightly to your freedoms

I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yestereday at the voting booth. — William F. Buckley, Jr. Up From Liberalism (1959)