Cherry and cherry blossom

The sweet life differs from the good life.

The sweet life is doing pretty much whatever comes into your head.

The good life is thinking about whatever comes into your head first, then either doing it or not doing it.

I could see the difference between the two in Italy, especially in the villages in the south, especially in Sicily when people gathered at the end of the day in little squares, at the bar, on benches.

It's a beautiful scene--old people and babies, kids kicking soccerballs, young mother's looking for some shade to park their strollers. I could see where democracy came from, that democracy came from little groups of people thinking about the difference between the sweet life and the good life and trying to find a way to have both.

I wanted to be one of them, to be descended from the original Greek and Roman, but I wasn't. But I could get a beer myself and sit in the square and watch, I was free to do that and I did.

There's a remarkable passage in vol. 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle,"--"It is not the case that we are born equal and the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal." 

History is this thing that hangs around us, no matter where we live, we're suspended from its space. A day like today begins like every other day begins, with what happened, and goes from there.