Word: cogito
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When John Paul visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, he was obviously stirred by the photographs of bomb victims and the heat-fused chunks of stone and metal. He paused for a full three minutes at the visitors' book before he wrote, "Ego cogito cogitationes pacis et non afflictionis, dicit Dominus." (It was a paraphrase of Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of affliction...
Russell Baker seems to have taken a wild swing at Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum when he came up with Televiso, ergo sum -"I am televised, therefore I am." Since "I am televised" is in the passive voice, his Latin verb, derived from video, videre, demands the same form. The correct version of his attractive thought would therefore be Televideor, ergo...
...would lead to car pooling and increased use of rails and other mass transit. The tax would cut down on the Sunday joyride, the midnight trip to the corner drugstore to get a pack of cigarettes, the national restlessness that led one observer to update Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum for America: "I move, therefore I'm alive." And the tax would be effective. The Federal Energy Administration reckons that every penny of such a surcharge would reduce gasoline consumption by 25,000 bbl. a day. The highest tax considered-30? a gallon-would save...
Goldfein's comedy manages the odd trick of being broad and donnish at the same time. He does Hegel with a sauerbraten accent: "Veil, now, vot ve got here? Ve got, for shtarters, ve got Descartes. Him and his Cogito, ergo sum ... Dot's an insight?" Not every one of these brief sketches works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus...
...questing, restless majority of the young may already be ahead of that issue. By the existential act of rejecting cogito, ergo sum for sum, ergo sum, they have taken on, willy-nilly, a vast commitment toward a kindlier, more equitable society. The young often seem romantics in search of a cause, rebels without raison d'etre. Yet in many ways they are markedly saner, more unselfish, less hag-ridden than their elders...