"Our feelings reach out beyond us"

Indeed they do.

We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be.

Montaigne's advice is Plato's: "Do thy job and know thyself."

Each of its two parts generally includes our whole duty, and likewise includes its fellow. He who would do his job would see that his first lesson is to know what he is and what is proper for him. And he who knows himself no longer takes extraneous business for his own; he loves and cultivates himself before anything else; he refuses superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects.

All good advice—if you live in early 16th century France. Which illustrates L.P. Hartley's maxim that the "past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I should very much like to cultivate my garden. But my garden, though part of the public trust, is decisively subject to the shifting pressures of capitalist global integration and disintegration. Isn't it obvious that the logical conclusion to the commoditization of labor is the commoditization of education?

One of my nerdy ninth graders has told me that he keeps Clausewitz's On War by his bedside. (And, dear Montaigne, I keep a copy of your Essays by mine.) I'm reminded of the insight that Clausewitz never had: "Politics is war by other means." Our wealthy ruling class is not going to send in the tanks to occupy and loot public education. It engages in politics instead, with all the advantages of immense wealth. And the rallying cry is, "It's for the children!"

I almost like the idea of the unreasonable and unruly Greeks, who know a thing or two about war and history, refusing out of nationalist pride to be solvent. In the end, Marx may have been right, but for all the wrong reasons. Let what will come come.

Perhaps because I'm not a mathematician, I find the profoundly mathematical nature of the universe to be astonishing. Except when it isn't. I find little that is mathematically graceful in the unrelenting complications of human interaction. It drives me to want to shut out the world at every chance I get. My feelings range too much beyond me, and I seek a still point of calm in a still moment—a moment in which, if I can't know myself, I can at least know my own thoughts.