Blog Entries from jim onion

  1. Cyntisthenes and Mardysseus

    Under the midday sun in the marketplace, people were bustling, merchants were competing, and the elegant marble fountain was bubbling. So Cyntisthenes, sitting alone on the stone steps with his chin resting on folded hands, looked decidedly out of place. To Mardysseus, he seemed outright dejected. Mardysseus approached him. "My good friend Cyntisthenes, why the grave expression?" he asked, sitting down beside him. "Are you deep in thought?" "I suppose," Cyntisthenes sighed. "No matter how...
  2. The Way of Walking Alone (or The Way of Self-Reliance)

    Just finished reading The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, translated by William Scott Wilson. Included in it were 21 precepts that Musashi wrote only days before his death; they take up only two pages in the ~100 page book. At first I wondered why they were included, until I quickly realized that the precepts are the irreducible, atomized points of the "Way" which are further expanded upon by Musashi in this work. These precepts were called The Way of Walking Alone (or The Way of...
  3. First Day of College

    To start with a focus on the positive, classes went well! I found them without trouble, although I'll definitely be needing an umbrella as the walk for one of them is about 5 minutes. The professors seem very reasonable and helpful. Both the journalism and the English professor handed out their respective syllabuses, which outline all 16 weeks of the course. Convenient. I'm already building a head start on the reading. It's actually pretty enjoyable work. I committed to helping a guy named...
  4. Your Name

    I already knew what would happen and still I sat there by myself in theater 12, holding back tears. Once I walked out of AMC and crossed the parking-lot to my car, that's when I cried. Just like the previous four times. "Your Name" is an anime film about a guy and girl who switch bodies temporarily, and figuring out the meaning of that is what brings them together. There's more to it but I don't want to spoil anything. This fifth and final viewing was different though, because I finally...
  5. Book Review: The Rommel Papers

    The Rommel Papers are the incomplete memoirs of senior military commander Erwin Rommel that avoided burning by the author himself while under investigation by the gestapo, and remained hidden with the cooperation of friends and family after Hitler forced him to commit suicide on the grounds of suspected treason. Kept safe from the hands of the Nazis and Soviets, and recovered from their secret locations or American possession following the culmination of the Second World War, Captain...
  6. Knowledge Isn't Power, Mr. Bacon

    Gather around, ladies and gentlemen. It's story-time with Uncle Rommel! In seriousness, there's much to glean from "The Rommel Papers". If you're unfamiliar please feel free to check out my review of it here first. Approaching these memoirs from just a historical or military angle is to miss the insights on life and human nature. What I will be grappling with here is a specific contrast Rommel makes between professors of economics and businessmen, found on page 288. "There often occurred...
  7. On Freedom

    An important thing to remember is that threat of punishment cannot strip you of your natural freedom. You have the liberty to do whatever you want. But we've decided that certain things are not permissible for the sake of maintaining a functioning order. Choose to exercise the freedom to take away freedom, and you'll be punished for doing so. Yet you still have the option to do it in the first place. Such is the necessary risk we all take in having the gift of free-will. There will always...
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