RESPICE FINEM

       Respice finem means to heed your end,
       An ancient admonition to regard
       Your wandering from the rightful way and mend
       Your errancy on courses so ill-starred.

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KNOWING AND BELIEVING

         To know: to apprehend, to understand,
         To hold a thing or thought with certainty,
         Is different from believing on command,
         Taking on faith, as with a deity.
         The first, by fact or logic’s evident;
         The other, one may hope, is heaven sent.

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HOMO QUESTOR

Cats are curious, sometimes perilously.  Dogs are curious, mainly about scents and intruders.  All creatures are searchers, if only for food, shelter and mates. 

But human beings might better be nominated Homo questor than Homo sapiens, since sapience is more our aspiration than a generic trait.  Homo questor is the perennially seeking species, curious and inquisitive about all things great and small, deep and shallow. 

That intelligence which affords us the power to develop languages thereby gives us the means to inquire, to articulate questions and develop answers to communicate to others. 

So avid is our curiosity that we sometimes pose and ponder questions so perplexing that they have been dubbed enduring questions or perennial questions, to be revisited generation after generation, era after era: What is the meaning of life?  Is there life after death?  Does evolution have a goal?  What is the Good Life? 

One might even ask, “Why do we ask questions?”  One answer is that we do so because we can, and we might assume that the universe has made us so that it can be conscious of itself. 

Now who put us up to that?

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HELL’S A FABLE

“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” 

            —Marlowe’s Mephastophilis

      No, hell is not hereafter—hell is here,
      And heaven, too, for those who merit it.
      There is no afterlife you need to fear
      To which your severed soul will finally flit:
      This Earth, this present life, is all there is,
      One opportunity to make the best
      And prove yourself a loser or a whiz:
      To live well here and now is mankind’s quest.
      Yet if that ancient fable helps you fare
      More righteously, expecting a reward,
      Or when calamity befalls, to bear
      Your pain and find emotional accord,
           Then put your fancy to its highest use
           And let your blissfulness be your excuse.

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A GOOD LIFE

for H. Hayward Hirsch
A Good Man

  It’s not how someone dies that’s bad or good,
  But whether one has lived as humans should—
  Humanely, with a care for the well-being
  Of others in their needs, since that is freeing;
  While otherwise—self-centered, clamped and cold—
  Reveals a soul like Faustus’ that’s been sold
  To purchase vain delight and fickle pleasure,
  Imperiling a human’s only treasure:
  Our precious essence of integrity,
  That holy wholeness we are meant to be.
       The end of all our race is to be well,
       Yet failing that high goal, we end in hell.

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INNATE HUMANITY

          Although our race seems naturally insane,
          We have it in our hearts to grow humane.

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“HEAVEN IS REAL”—NEWSWEEK

      Perhaps it’s true that Heaven above is real,
      As even now one neuroscientist
      Attests, making a rational appeal
      Against what other scientists insist.
      Although his neo-cortex was shut down,
      And he was thus incapable of thought,
      He yet could see a world beyond renown,
      A glorious realm of light where he was taught
      By grand seraphic beings’ wordless speech
      That all the Universe is filled with love
      Eternally and, just as pastors preach,
      This world will be surpassed by that above.
           Yet even this won’t quell the skeptics’ doubt
           Who’d rather wait to see what he found out.

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