Dear Bill,

I'm one of the oppressively chatty people who has recently wandered in, though I do try to keep things in the proper subject area. I have a philosophy of how boards ought to work. That is, when you want to talk about something, you just bring it up. Sometimes people are not going to be interested in your proposed topic and sometimes they are. This bears strong resemblance to real life, because it is real life, or a piece of it. We are participants and not just observers, a board is a complex interactive environment and not just a word museum. (You being the most affable curmudgeon I have ever encountered, I trust you will not interpret this mild teasing as meanness.) I like to talk about words, but just as much I love to use them and see them used -- as in WON's slice of Emerson, but also in your responses and in those of others.

There are lots of boards on the net. And for each of them, people come and people go. Interests change. People move on to new stages in their lives. Important demands compete for attention. I don't think comings and goings should make your community self-conscious. (The nastiness, which I've witnessed here but not experienced, is another issue. It might give some newcomers pause.)

But to follow through on your suggestion to post what we have read, there's something I read this morning. (I'm not sure whether you had intended these should follow this thread or should start in a new one.) It's a quotation from a supplement to Capek's R.U.R. I found on the web. I don't recall reading any supplement in my copy, but I like this a lot, so I put it here for your amusement or vilification.


"Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds,
the most important thing is -- and that is the point I want to stress --
that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word. . . .
I ask whether it is not possible to see in the present social conflict
of the world an analogous struggle between two, three, five equally
serious verities and equally generous idealisms? I think it is possible,
and that is the most dramatic element in modern civilization, that a
human truth is opposed to another human truth no less human, ideal
against ideal, positive worth against worth no less positive, instead
of the struggle being as we are so often told, one between noble truth
and vile selfish error."

(R.U.R._ supplement, p.11) I cut and pasted from http://www.u.arizona.edu/~gmcmilla/talk.html.

It reminds me of that phrase I heard once about the opposite of a great truth being another great truth. (Niels Bohr?) I won't go into detail about why this resonates with me, because that would be too chatty, but I really do like it a lot.



k