Zora

            On Saturday I spent most of the day reading Peter Abelard’s “Ethics” three times so I could write my paragraph in response to the question that’s due on Tuesday in my philosophy tutorial:

Abelard’s example of the slave killing his master to save his own life is confusing. He first seems to imply that the act is not sinful because the slave had no choice, but then he declares that the slave has sinned after all because he has consented to killing the master. I think that Abelard means that it depends on what is in the slave’s mind at the moment of the killing. If the slave feels the urge to kill the master and then does so, even though he is saving his own life, he is nonetheless committing the sin of murder. But if at the moment of the killing he has not formed the intention to kill his master, then in doing so he has not sinned.

Once I got that done I was too tired to work on my essay, which is also due on Tuesday.

At 17:00 I went out to buy two cans of beer. Just as I was stepping out onto Queen Street I checked my pocket for my keys and realized that I didn’t have them. My foot caught the door before it locked and I went back upstairs to get the keys. It would have been just what I needed to be stuck for several hours outside my place when I have work to do at home on a Saturday evening.

I watched the third Mickey Mouse Club broadcast from 1955. This was the year I was born. I recall hearing about the Mickey Mouse Club show when I started watching TV in 1959 but all we got on one of our two channels was The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. I definitely would have liked it when I was a kid if it had been on.

            I read Zora Neale Hurston’s “What It’s Like To Be Coloured Me”. Some of the writing had a Beat feel to it even though it was written in the late 1920s. I was expecting it to be angry but it was actually quite funny. Her reaction to prejudice was, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”