Soul Food: Week of December 12, 2021

“Soul Food” is a regularly updated calendar of meditations sometimes questioning conventional wisdom & often suggesting eternal values

Sunday: The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Oft-quoted paraphrase of science fiction writer Ray Cummings

Monday: Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Bill Clinton

Tuesday: Da mihi factum, dabo tibi ius or Give me the facts and I will give you the law. Ancient maxim

Wednesday: If the facts are on your side, pound the facts into the table. If the law is on your side, pound the law into the table. If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table. Carl Sandburg, Alan Dershowitz, Al Gore, et al

Thursday: Faber est suae quisque fortunae, i.e., Every man is the artisan of his own fortune. Appius Claudius Caecus

Friday: We are the Vagabonds that sleep In ditches by the midnight ways Where wolves beneath the gibbets leap: Out hands against black Fate we raise In lifelong turmoil of affrays, Until we die, in some dark den, The death of dogs that hunger slays: For we are hated of all men. Stuart Merrill’s Ballade of the Outcasts, The Voice of Men

Saturday: We are the Courtesans that creep beyond the town’s lamp-litten haze, Toward the bridges of the deep; We watch the dawn with sinful gaze, And dreaming of the golden days When Jesus hallowed Magdalene, We seek death in the river’s maze: For we are hated of all men. Stuart Merrill’s Ballade of Outcasts, The Voice of Women

Davd Soul