What Europe and America call science and philosophy began in Greece. Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian? In my experience, a Platonist who condescends to read my more worldly thoughts, spilling out in exhaustively parenthesised arguments, will become frustrated when my mind leans to Aristotle’s pragmatism. And I defend myself, according to my kind, with the following observation: ____Nothing remains of Aristotle’s gymnasium of the Lyceum other than these few foundation stones you see here embedded in the ground, not far from the corner of present day Tower St. and Monastery Ave. in central Athens. [The image above shows that excavation (its historical significance only discovered in 1996) with me on the far left listening hard for the echoes of two-and-a-half-thousand year old deliberations. Of course these rebound in the modern ear (though remarkably less often than you’d think) with the naïveté of all beginnings]. Yet, after 2,400 years, the ground “The Philosopher” prepared for fearless evidence-based reasoning, however dated, is still the best foundation we have to stand on as we now make our 21st century leap into a scary, but recognisably human, future.____ [Banner note was written end of May, 2025]
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Sunday, June 1, 2025, 9:00 pm: Over the last 2 days I’ve been thinning out the tangle of lilac and ash-leaf maple trees that overhangs the longish concrete-slab stairway approaching from Bay St. to our front porch, with it’s gated arbor archway (lately “arbored” almost to the breaking point). In the process, I’m cognizant of the natural human tendency to see beauty in tameness rather than in wildness. To appreciate wildness you really need to understand the evo-ecology thinning by which the Natural World in fact achieves its maximum diversity; it’s this informs my pruning choices. Our front yard is not to be “tame” like the Greek islands Judy and I recently visited, or like the English countryside described as beautiful in a James Harriet or even a Jane Austen novel. The lilacs and ash-leaf maples, being edge species here rather than climax, see to that in the sense that they will encourage diverse wildlife and understory shrubs if we let them. A town yard can never be a climax ecosystem of course, and invasive species are rampant here; when they start to “take over”, well that’s not the diversity of wilderness either, so they get pulled.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2025: Arrived in Athens 2 days ago but, having just got off the ferry to Paros Island, this is the first chance I’ve had to see the Greek countryside. The evidence of humanity’s 7000 yr experiment with civilization and literature are all around me, and yes, I’m drawn into the maelstrom of such a progressive period of firsts: in architecture, in agriculture, in technology, in the invention of science itself! And yet this is only half of what’s going through my mind. And the real truth is it’s the shallower half. What have we done to Nature’s 500,000,000 yr progress?
Sunday, May 25, 2025, 9:30 pm: Sitting on our hotel rooftop terrace here in Athens, I can see the Parthenon and Athena’s Old Temple on the Acropolis. It’s impressive enough how much history has survived the changes, Crusades, and just plain attrition of 7,000 years, but what I’m feeling, in the moment, is an overriding wonder. After all this time, something entirely new is happening here: reconstructing a past which should be past! Human antiquity made novelty? Or am I being misanthropic, again? Perhaps the impulse itself is what’s wholly new, and this learning from history can become also true of our politics, and our relationship to the Natural World?
Monday, May 26, 2025: My wife warned me of course: “You’re crazy to take that knife on the plane!” But it’d become part of me you see. Anyway, it was indeed finally confiscated at 7:30 this evening at New York’s JFK airport. Well… it was 1:30 tomorrow morning by Athens time in my jet-lagged head and I was prepared to put up a little fight just to keep myself awake. After all, it had been my constant companion of the last 15 years, and so I challenged the large and intimidating black lady holding it — also sporting the shiny US Marshall style badge — by insisting “It’s been through Toronto, Amsterdam, and Athens in the last 9 days without creating an international incident!”
“Not Here!” she said.
No great loss really. I’d been looking to replace it for the last year or 3, but Victorinox has apparently gone out of fashion, and the blade with the broken tip was long-since dull enough to strip the insulation off the thinnest factory-installed stranded copper wires without causing the kind of damage requiring me to buy a whole new thermostat.
In the US they say everybody has the right to own an assault rifle. But a 76 yr old Canadian electrician on stop-over between extranational flights at a US airport, crazy or not, has to hand over his 2-inch Swiss Army Knife — with the toothpick, tweezers, and those oh-so-handy spring-loaded scissors.
