I don't have much to say

that's worth listening to.

I think people can be very inspiring and moving. I would like to show beauty, wisdom and kindess to my students but I am either incapable or it is too hard. I must do better.

We went to Florence. It's one of the most incredible places on earth. You can see Michelangelo's slaves writhing within their marble, almost physically trying to struggle out of the rock in front of your eyes.

I think this might be Michelangelo's greatest work because it is about struggle, not about perfection. Of course the artist didn't intend it this way, but that's what he left us so we may do with it as we may.








Then again there's this. Who am I to argue with this vision of man: confident, beautiful and assured. Wasn't it also the Renaissance that gave us Machiavelli.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Crazy for love. Machiavelli catches you off guard sometimes with this kind of thing. Crazy for love. What a funny thing to say.

I want this:

How exciting this is. How wild and full of life it is. I can feel the bass riding up; the drums going out to the cymbals; the voice soaring up above the guitar.

It's nothing really. A finger on a string, a stick on the skin of a drum, a chisel on the flesh of the marble, but it is everything we can be. Crazy for love. Struggling out of the stone.

Unassured, unbeautiful, unfinished and flawed.