What is there? There is being, and there are beings. What is the relation between being and beings, or are they related? And what do we mean when we say there is being, and there are beings? And how do we know that there is being and there are beings? And is this all there is, or is there anything else? (We say a thing is, so also, what is ( Read more... )

But this is how you have to begin, isn't it? You have to look carefully at all the situations in which we say the word "is", and any of its cognates -- and consider whether this or that situation has anything in common with all or any of the others -- and then describe what it is they have in common, if they have anything in common at all. (And ( Read more... )

What is there? There are beings. And there is being. And perhaps there is something else, beyond this. But each of these points must be clarified ( Read more... )

I imagined that there had to be a teacher. Teachers were better then books, because you could ask them questions. Books ask you questions, sometimes, but they don’t go out of their way, to help you answer them ( Read more... )

Our words survive us and we take pleasure in their survival -- just as we take pleasure in the survival of our children. But very few men are survived by their own words -- for most, a saying or a turn of phrase will descend a few generations, but no longer (though a small selection of the phrases and the sayings survive, it is true, in the local ( Read more... )

Is there something? If something is, it is a being. (I mean, not if something is red, but if something is, simply.) What being is, is to be the being it is and to be what that being is. What a being is, is not only the being that it is, but also whatever it is being. (A human being is being human. The being that is a human being, is not only ( Read more... )

"It cannot come from being, unless it were not, and it cannot come from nothing, unless it were. It therefore never becomes, but only is ( Read more... )

"Water is the beginning of all things, for of water and into water our lives are born. The primitives of life bathe and are bathed in the encompassing flow. The flow of water is not a separation of water from itself, but the expression of water's essence and true being. Water suffuses all things, tearing them out of themselves and throwing them ( Read more... )

I live on an island -- not deserted, but an island all the same. The matter of the island -- what it is made of -- extends below an ocean whose tide is rising. I know that someday the ocean will engulf me in a quest which is always for the hindmost air. The material is the result of a fathomless chain of being, extending perhaps to infinity, and ( Read more... )

"When did you begin making the collections ( Read more... )