Cash does nails.

Many thanks to Jennifer of Conversion Diary for her beautiful commentary on this Johnny Cash cover of the Nine-Inch Nails' "Hurt." Jennifer is truly a Philosopher Mom par excellence! It truly makes us more human, and I can't wait to thank Johnny personally someday... when all the empires of dirt are washed away.

The political season always recalls me to poems like The Destruction of Sennacherib and Shelley's brilliant Ozymandias. The feeling of great nations is a dramatic lesson for understanding the ultimate transience of all human empires.

But a song like this -- a much smaller, but more fundamental scale than Shelley or Keats -- is somehow more proportional to our human minds. It's hard to grasp the part I play on the scale of Egypt, Persia, Rome, or Great Britain. But I sure know exactly where my own little "empire of dirt" lies. Nations fall because they are dust--and so do we.

A human scale. A human story. A human song.