Goldstein Quotes

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)

I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to get at that information,” said Leslie. “Don’t look,” said Goldstein, peering over Charles’s shoulder. “We don’t know anything about illegal hacking.” He whistled cheerily.

Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears!

Every time we become aware of a thought, as opposed to being lost in a thought, we experience that opening of the mind.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.

Whatever has the nature to arise has the nature to cease.

Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.

Guilt is a manifestation of condemnation or aversion towards oneself, which does not understand the changing transformative quality of mind. 'Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

The greatest communication is usually how we are rather than what we say.

The commitment to morality, or non-harming, is a source of tremendous strength, because it helps free the mind from the remorse of having done unwholesome actions. Freedom from remorse leads to happiness. Happiness leads to concentration. Concentration brings wisdom. And wisdom is the source of peace and freedom in our lives.

Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker.

In India, I was living in a little hut, about six feet by seven feet. It had a canvas flap instead of a door. I was sitting on my bed meditating, and a cat wandered in and plopped down on my lap. I took the cat and tossed it out the door. Ten seconds later it was back on my lap. We got into a sort of dance, this cat and I...I tossed it out because I was trying to meditate, to get enlightened. But the cat kept returning. I was getting more and more irritated, more and more annoyed with the persistence of the cat. Finally, after about a half-hour of this coming in and tossing out, I had to surrender. There was nothing else to do. There was no way to block off the door. I sat there, the cat came back in, and it got on my lap. But I did not do anything. I just let go. Thirty seconds later the cat got up and walked out. So, you see, our teachers come in many forms.

A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.

Just as the light of a single candle can dispel the darkness of a thousand years, the moment we light a single candle of wisdom, no matter how long or deep our confusion, ignorance is dispelled.

The truth, my friend, is an awesome thing, to be handled with wisdom and with courage denied to ordinary people. Most of us must make do with illusions. Or else -- or else we could not endure.

We can then see for ourselves the obvious truth that when we cling or hold on to that which changes, we suffer.

What if the Devil doesn't know he's the Devil?

Certain voices hold this odd pull on our heartstrings. They are like sad oboes or something, something that makes you want to throw all your money at the radio while yelling, "I love you." I don't know what it is.

On the deepest level, problems such as war and starvation are not solved by economics and politics alone. Their source is prejudice and fear in the human heart — and their solution also lies in the human heart.

Come, come, come? I'm not asking for hundreds of pounds, just a little to start with. Will someone say ten shillings?' 'I can say it, Father' said Milligan, 'but I haven't got it.' 'I've got it,' thought Dr Goldstein, 'but I'm not going to say it.

What you are looking for is what is looking.

Generosity, love, compassion, or devotion do not depend on a high IQ.

Our progress in meditation does not depend on the measure of pleasure or pain in our experience. Rather, the quality of our practice has to do with how open we are to whatever is there.

The wonderful paradox about the truth of suffering is that the more we open to it and understand it, the lighter and freer our mind becomes. Our mind becomes more spacious, more open, and happier as we move past our avoidance and denial to see what is true. We become less driven by compulsive desires and addictions, because we see clearly the nature of things as they are.

The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

Without the steadiness of concentration, it is easy to get caught up in the feelings, perceptions, and thoughts as they arise. We take them to be self and get carried away by trains of association and reactivity.

One of the great misconceptions we often carry throughout our lives is that our perceptions of ourselves and the world are basically accurate and true, that they reflect some stable, ultimate reality. This misconception leads to tremendous suffering, both globally and in our personal life situations.

We want more than there is.

We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.

That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.

People. Products. Profits. In that order.

Love, compassion, and peace do not belong to any religion or tradition. They are qualities in each one of us, qualities of our hearts and minds..

It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.

Hatred never ceases by hatred; it only ceases by love.

How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?

one of the most radical, far-reaching, and challenging statements of the Buddha is his statement that as long as there is attachment to the pleasant and aversion to the unpleasant, liberation is impossible.

True humility is the absence of anyone to be proud.” Humility is not a stance; it is simply the absence of self. In the same way, relationship is the absence of separation, and it can be felt with each breath, each sensation, each thought, each cloud in the sky, each person that we meet. “And being nothing, you are everything. That is all.

Imagine holding on to a hot burning coal. You would not fear letting go of it. In fact, once you noticed that you were holding on, you would probably drop it quickly. But we often do not recognize how we hold on to suffering. It seems to hold on to us. This is our practice: becoming aware of how suffering arises in our mind and of how we become identified with it, and learning to let it go. We learn through simple and direct observation, seeing the process over and over again until we understand.

Aspirations inspire us, while expectations simply lead us into cycles of hope and fear: hope that what we want will happen; fear that it won’t.

Finally, my mind just settled into the realization that accidents happen, and a mantra suddenly appeared in my mind, one that has served me well since: anything can happen anytime.

All things arise when the appropriate conditions are present, and all things pass away as conditions change. Behind the process, there is no “self” who is running the show.

Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied? And what is the use of being unhappy about something if it cannot be remedied?

Unless a practice cools the fires of greed, aversion, and ignorance it is worthless.

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

The sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, including advocates for 'adult' material such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein, represented porn to us as a great social radicalizer. But a nation of masturbating people who are looking at screens rather than at one another - who are consuming sex like any other product and who are rewiring their brains to find less and less abandon and joy in one another's arms, and to bond more and more with pixels - is a subjugated, not a liberated, population.

In Buddhist psychology “conceit” has a special meaning: that activity of the mind that compares itself with others. When we think about ourselves as better than, equal to, or worse than someone else, we are giving expression to conceit. This comparing mind is called conceit because all forms of it—whether it is “I’m better than” or “I’m worse than,” or “I’m just the same as”—come from the hallucination that there is a self; they all refer back to a feeling of self, of “I am.

We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death.

What hackers do is figure out technology and experiment with it in ways many people never imagined. They also have a strong desire to share this information with others and to explain it to people whose only qualification may be the desire to learn.

The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.

whatever we frequently think of and ponder, that will become the inclination of our minds.

Our failures in charity are chained to a narrowed vision of the world that makes too much of the differences between us, and this is our enslavement.

If you don’t exert yourself, or if your exertions don’t amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.

The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.

The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape. Whether that means actually leaving or simply figuring out a way to handle things so you don't go crazy is up to you.

Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.

If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.

Our mind becomes more spacious, more open, and happier as we move past our avoidance and denial to see what is true.

If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.

Most people believe that we are the thoughts that come through our mind. I hope not, because if we are, we are in big trouble! Those thoughts coming through have clearly been conditioned by something: by different events in our childhood, our environment, our past lives, or even some occurrence that has happened two minutes before.

On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.

We all know people who become strongly identified with, and attached to, their intelligence. It can become a big ego trap, harmful to oneself or others. Intelligence can also be a great blessing, providing invaluable clarity.

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.

In possibly one of the cutest facts you will ever read, sea otters hold each other’s paws whilst they are asleep so they don’t drift apart from each other.

he rubbed his feet back and forth on the library carpet and when she walked by, he touched her with the tip of his index finger

In his day, liking someone like David Bowie would have been the domain of degenerate officers in black and white movies about nazis.

Mindfulness, the Root of Happiness

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.

Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.

NEWT rummages in his pockets and pulls out a tiny bottle with only a couple of muddy drops left inside it. TINA: Is that Polyjuice? NEWT (of the bottle): Just enough to get me inside. He looks down at his coat and finds one of THESEUS’S hairs on his shoulder. He adds it to the mixture, drinks, and turns into THESEUS, still wearing NEWT’S clothes. TINA: Who—? NEWT: My brother, Theseus. He’s an Auror. And a hugger.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a great Dzogchen master of the last century, taught, “There is one thing we always need, and that is the watchman named mindfulness, the guard who is on the lookout for when we get carried away in mindlessness.

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)

But after years of practice I’ve come to feel grateful when I observe these unskillful patterns arise, because now I would rather see them than not see them. It becomes another chance to unhook from these patterns, to see their essential transparency, and to let go of the burden they bring.

The guardians of the just state should be the most underprivileged of all its citizens. It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

If we try to practice meditation without the foundation of goodwill to ourselves and others, it is like trying to row across a river without first untying the boat; our efforts, no matter how strenuous, will not bear fruit. We need to practice and refine our ability to live honestly and with integrity.

When we see deeply that all that is subject to arising is also subject to cessation, that whatever arises will also pass away, the mind becomes disenchanted. Becoming disenchanted, one becomes dispassionate. And through dispassion, the mind is liberated.

An emotion is like a cloud passing through the sky. Sometimes it is fear or anger, sometimes it is happiness or love, sometimes it is compassion. But none of them ultimately constitute a self. They are just what they are, each manifesting its own quality. With this understanding, we can cultivate the emotions that seem helpful and simply let the others be, without aversion, without suppression, without identification.

Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let’s find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don’t know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can’t communicate openly, there’s not much there to salvage.

When man of slender visits you / Nothing on earth that one can do / In well he’ll hide, or watery hole / And he will eat your mortal soul / so if thou seest the man so thin / pray you don’t see him again / for he is not from world we know / he cometh from far down below / on his bed of dirt from grave / from his dank and silent cave / he watches you yet has no sight / he taketh you away at night

INT. PARISIAN CAFÉ—EVENING KAMA leaves the café. The feather points at him. NEWT lets it out and it flies to KAMA’S hat. JACOB: Is that the guy we’re looking for? NEWT: Yes. NEWT and JACOB jump up to confront him. NEWT (to KAMA): Er—bonjour. Bonjour, monsieur. KAMA makes to carry on walking, ignoring NEWT. NEWT: Oh wait, no, sorry. We were . . . we were actually just wondering if you’d come across a friend of ours? JACOB:Tina Goldstein. KAMA: Monsieur, Paris is a large city. NEWT: She’s an Auror. When Aurors go missing, the Ministry tend to come looking, so . . . No, now I suppose it would probably be better if we just report her absence— KAMA (deciding): She is tall? Dark? Rather— JACOB: —intense? NEWT: —beautiful— JACOB (hasty, off NEWT’S look): —Yeah, what I meant to say—she’s very—very pretty— NEWT: She’s intense too.

The emphasis in meditation is very much on undistracted awareness: not thinking about things, not analyzing, not getting lost in the story, but just seeing the nature of what is happening in the mind. Careful, accurate observation of the moment’s reality is the key to the whole process.

by the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind—to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later. When we fail to act on such urges, it’s rarely out of mean-spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts about whether the prospective recipient deserves it. More often, it’s because of some attitude stemming from our efforts to feel in control of our time. We tell ourselves we’ll turn to it when our urgent work is out of the way, or when we have enough spare time to do it really well; or that we ought first to spend a bit longer researching the best recipients for our charitable donations before making any, et cetera.

As Raimon and Desire listened, Aimeric sang of Carenza's beauty. He sang of the oaths he had given to his lord, the count Bertran, and of another oath, one that he had sworn to Countess Carenza in his heart. He would keep her at the forefront of his thoughts, he would cherish her forever. They would never satisfy their desire, never even kiss one another, but he would be faithful to her until he died.

The single craziest thing about being a priest, he’d found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It’s not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself.

I have no parents I make the heavens and earth my parents I have no home I make awareness my home I have no life or death I make the tides of breathing my life and death I have no divine power I make honesty my divine power I have no friends I make my mind my friend I have no enemy I make carelessness my enemy I have no armor I make benevolence my armor I have no castle I make immovable-mind my castle I have no sword I make absence of self my sword.

Dear 2600: …So, in the interest of information gathering and because I am a subscriber, are you going to be checking me out? This would be unnecessary since we checked you out before you subscribed. That’s why we made sure you heard about us and followed the plan by subscribing. Writing this letter, however, was not part of the plan and we will be taking corrective action.

We can also strengthen the quality of ardor by reflecting on the transiency of all phenomena. Look at all the things we become attached to, whether they are people or possessions or feelings or conditions of the body. Nothing we have, no one in our lives, no state of mind is exempt from change. Nothing at all can prevent the universal process of birth, growth, decay, and death.

For Desire, who is male and female, fair and dark, old and young, anything and everything you have ever wished for, or coveted, or needed, is irresistible. And so what would be the point, after all? Love is not a game to Desire, as it is to so many mortals, or if it is, it is a game with a foregone conclusion: Desire always wins. And Desire hates more than anything to be bored.

No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

INT. MINISTÈRE DES AFFAIRES MAGIQUES, RECORDS ROOM ATRIUM—NIGHT MELUSINE: Puis-je vous aider? NEWT: Er—yes, this is Leta Lestrange. And—I’m her— TINA: Fiancé. There is an increased awkwardness between them. NEWT: Tina, about that fiancée business— TINA (brittle): Sorry, yeah. I should have congratulated you— The doors to the records office open. They enter briskly. INT. MINISTÈRE DES AFFAIRES MAGIQUES, RECORDS ROOM—NIGHT The doors close behind them, plunging them into darkness. NEWT: No, that’s— TINA: Lumos. NEWT: Tina—about Leta— TINA: Yes, I’ve just said, I am happy for you— NEWT: Yeah, well, don’t. She stops. Looks at him. What? NEWT: Please don’t be happy. (in trouble) Uh, no, no. I’m sorry. I don’t . . . Uh, obviously, I—Obviously I want you to be. And I hear that you are now. Uh, which is wonderful. Sorry— (a gesture of hopelessness) What I’m trying to say is, I want you to be happy, but don’t be happy that I’m happy, because I’m not. (off her confusion) Happy. (off her continued confusion) Or engaged. TINA: What? NEWT: It was a mistake in a stupid magazine. My brother’s marrying Leta, June the sixth. I’m supposed to be best man. Which is sort of mildly hilarious. TINA: Does he think you’re here to win her back? (beat) Are you here to win her back? NEWT: No! I’m here to— A beat. He stares at her. NEWT: —you know, your eyes really are— TINA: Are what? NEWT: I’m not supposed to say. Pickett is climbing out of NEWT’S pocket onto the nearest shelf. NEWT doesn’t notice. A beat. In a rush TINA: Newt, I read your book, and did you—? NEWT: I still have a picture of you—wait, did you read—? NEWT pulls the picture of her from his breast pocket and unfolds it. She is inordinately touched. He looks from the picture to TINA. NEWT: I got this—I mean, it’s just a picture of you from the paper, but it’s interesting because your eyes in newsprint . . . See, in reality they have this effect in them, Tina . . . It’s like fire in water, in dark water. I’ve only ever seen that— (struggling) I’ve only ever seen that in— TINA (whispers): Salamanders?

One of the world’s most fascinating mysteries is surely the Tamam Shud case. In December 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Adelaide. The only clue to a possible identity was a tiny piece of paper found in a hidden pocket sewn into the trousers of the dead man with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ scribbled on it. The phrase is used on the last page of a collection of poems of Omar Khayyam called The Rubaiyat, a copy of which was found with a scribbled code in it, which was believed to have been written in there by the dead man. What does the code mean? What was it leading him to? Why and how did he die? All of these questions remain completely unanswered to this day and the case is as much of a mystery now as it was the very day the body was discovered.

...(W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks--even pre-philosophically--is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.

TINA: I’ll have to go to the Ministry with what I’ve got. (a wobble in her voice) It was nice to see you again, Mr. Scamander. She strides from the room, leaving NEWT perplexed and upset. INT. FLAMEL HOUSE, HALLWAY—AFTERNOON JACOB follows TINA into the hall. JACOB: Hey, hold on one second, will you? Well, hold on! Wait! Tina! She leaves. As the front door closes, NEWT appears at the drawing room door. JACOB: (to NEWT) You didn’t mention salamanders, did you? NEWT: No, she just—ran. I don’t know . . . JACOB (firm): So you chase after her! NEWT grabs his case. He leaves.  EXT. RUE DE MONTMORENCY—END OF DAY TINA is hurrying up the road. NEWT hastens to catch up. NEWT: Tina. Please, just listen to me— TINA: Mr. Scamander, I need to go talk to the Ministry—and I know how you feel about Aurors— NEWT: I may have been a little strong in the way that I expressed myself in that letter— TINA: What was the exact phrase? “A bunch of careerist hypocrites”? NEWT: I’m sorry, but I can’t admire people whose answer to everything that they fear or misunderstand is “kill it”! TINA: I’m an Auror and I don’t— NEWT: Yes, and that’s because you’ve gone middle head! TINA (stopping): Excuse me? NEWT: It’s an expression derived from the three heads of the Runespoor. The middle one is the visionary. Every Auror in Europe wants Credence dead—except you. You’ve gone middle head. A beat. TINA: Who else uses that expression, Mr. Scamander? NEWT considers. NEWT: I think it might just be me.

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

Dear 2600: Tell me how much one of your hackers would charge me to delete my criminal record from the Texas police database. [NAME DELETED] Well, we would start with erasing your latest crime, that of soliciting a minor to commit another crime. (Your request was read by a small child here in the office.) After you’re all paid up on that, we will send out the bill for hiding your identity by not printing your real name, which you sent us like the meathead you apparently are. After that’s all sorted, we can assemble our team of hackers, who sit around the office waiting for such lucrative opportunities as this to come along, and figure out even more ways to shake you down. It’s what we do, after all. Just ask Fox News.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.

I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented. ... The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse. The subject is far more interesting than that. ... When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. You have to keep them straight.... ...(T)he assessment of those intuitions in terms of the argument's soundness isn't accomplished by work done in the context of discovery. And conversely, one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life (pp. 160-161).