But there are holes in this Swiss cheese. First, while it is true that ‘events’ constitute the universe, what we’re calling ‘events’ (above) are rarely primordial events.

Suppose every day we could vote what weather we were to have tomorrow. What fighting there would be, what killing of one neighbor by another…most things that we vote for do not really matter, you are a little more or a little less uncomfortable as the government does one thing or another but the weather oh dear…that would be a disaster.”

A survey of Western traditions suggests that May Day might once have been the most important day of the year. That’s right, May Day! This day links pagan fertility rites, mythology, cosmology, Christian theology, and Marxist ideology. Quite a feat! Or is it?

This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.”

You can’t resist the urge. You peek back at the front cover. Is this really a book about Eastern Europe c. 1000 A.D.?

We expect that death will seem closer each time we check, but surprisingly, that isn’t what we experience. It seems as though death were retreating from us. The closer we get, the further it recedes.

A famous paradox runs like this: “Is it good because it is God’s will, or is it God’s will because it is good?” In other words, is God subject to universal ethical standards or are those standards universal merely because God wills them?

What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? Of course, by now we all know the answer: human beings. Babies crawl (4), adults walk (2), seniors often need a cane (3). But there’s more to this riddle than meets the eye.

Time is the spotlight of being. For a short while, we are in the spot; then we aren’t. We are merely ‘shadows of our former selves’ (shades).

For the most part, modern English limits itself to a handful of cases, voices, moods, etc. That would not do for Gertrude Stein. She needed more!

We honor ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ as inalienable human rights, but not all of us can say with assurance that we are always on the side of ‘life’ and ‘liberty’. Sometimes we can’t even agree on what these words mean, and we certainly don’t agree on how these rights should be applied in specific situations. (For example, many of the men who wrote the Declaration themselves owned slaves. We don’t always see ourselves through the eyes of civilization or the lens of history.)

Classification is a tool we use to organize our experiences into categories based on the intrinsic content of those experiences. Flying in planes may define a different category of experience from hiking in mountains. Of course, no two flights are ever the same, nor are any two hikes. Still, it is useful for some purposes (not all) to classify these experiences differently.