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| Edward Hopper Soir Bleu 1914 oil on canvas |
If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
Saturday, February 24, 2024
On getting............................
...............................an "A" in life:
Realizing that education begins after graduation is a vital first step.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
expanded minds...........................
Lucy was especially homesick for her family and the gaiety of her life of just a few years earlier. She felt out of place in Connecticut, where the people, she thought, lacked gentility and displayed coarse manners and unrefined behavior. Henry advised her: "Take care, my love of permitting your disgust to the Connecticut people to escape your lips. Indiscreet expressions are handed from town to town and a long while remembered by people not blessed with expanded minds. The want of that refinement which you seem to speak of is, or will be, the salvation of America; for refinement of manners introduces corruption and venality. . . . There is a kind of simplicity in young states as in young children which is quite pleasing to an attentive observer."
-Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution
Them................................
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
-Terry Pratchett, Jingo
a mad intoxication..................
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| The Cathedral Rodin 1908 Stone original/Bronze casting |
For him life is an endless joy, a perpetual delight, a mad intoxication. Not all seems good to him, for suffering, which must often come to those he loves and to himself, cruelly contradicts his optimism. But all is beautiful to him because he walks forever in the light of spiritual truth.
Fantasy..........................
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Opening paragraphs..........
My mother says I reopened Uncle Jake's private investigation agency because I'm always losing men, so it's natural for me to search for things that are missing. This would offend some women my age, but she had a stroke two years back and now her damaged brain relies on honesty instead of good manners, so I've got no choice but to take it in stride. One thing I've learned is, don't argue with the truth on those scarce occasions when you're lucky enough to know what the truth is.
-Randy Wayne White, Gone
Meaning...........................
People who are confident in their beliefs feel no need to pillory or caricature their opponents.
Curiosity leads to science, but it also leads to questions unanswerable by science.
A mood is not a truth; a feeling is not a fact.
Meaning is a phenomenon not of nature but of culture.
Nature is sublimely indifferent to who we are and what we deserve.
Science deals in explanation. Meaning is always a matter of interpretation.
Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal.
-all quotes taken from The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Delacroix................................
Eugene Delacroix La Liberté guidant le peuple 1830 Oil
They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.
surpassingly.........................
Today you did things that humans 50 years ago wouldn't believe and 200 years ago would struggle to imagine.
You know the names of planets
and the shapes of the bones inside you.
and the shapes of the bones inside you.
You comprehend death and make art.
You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study.
You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study.
I love you.
Jarod K. Anderson, Crush from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest
a natural upshot.....................
What sort of ecology can preserve a robust intellectual biodiversity? We often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice. Yet the market ideal of choice and attendant preoccupation with freedom tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self. At least the market seems to have this effect when we are constantly being addressed with hyperpalatable stimuli. What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?
-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Monday, February 19, 2024
Fifty years ago.............................
responsibilities...................
It's more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it's to improve conditions for our successors.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Homer...........................
Sunset Fires Winslow Homer 1880 Watercolor
The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.
Sunday, February 18, 2024
an uncompromising man..............
What made him truly original was that he presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister. Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world. Malcolm was a committed student of black folk culture, and to make a political point he would constantly mix animal stories, rural metaphors, and trickster tales—for example, refashioning the fox vs. the wolf as Johnson vs. Goldwater. His speeches mesmerized audiences because he could orchestrate his themes into a narrative that promised ultimate salvation. He presented himself as an uncompromising man wholly dedicated to the empowerment of black people, without regard to his own personal safety. Even those who rejected his politics recognized his sincerity.
-Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
native freedom...............
[24] Consider how we apply the idea of freedom to animals. [25] There are tame lions that people cage, raise, feed and take with them wherever they go. Yet who will call such a lion free? The easier its life, the more slavish it is. No lion endowed with reason and discretion would choose to be one of these pet specimens.
[26] The birds above us, when they are caught and raised in a cage, will try anything for the sake of escape. Some starve to death rather than endure their condition. [27] Those that survive - barely, grudgingly, wasting away - fly off in an instant when they find the least little opening to squeeze through, so great is their need for their native freedom, so strong the desire to be independent and unconfined. [28] 'Well, what's wrong with you here in your cage?' 'You can ask? I was born to fly wherever I like, to live in the open air, to sing whenever I want. You take all this away from me and then say, "What's wrong with you?"
-Epictetus, The Discourses, Book IV
Partners............................
. . . religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain. They perform different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction. . . .
Science is about explanation. Religion is about meaning. Science analyses, religion integrates. Science breaks things down to their component parts. Religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is. Religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes. Religion beckons, summons, calls. Science sees objects. Religion speaks to us as subjects. Science practices detachment. Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul. Science sees the underlying order of the physical world. Religion hears the music beneath the noise. Science is the conquest of ignorance. Religion is the redemption of solitude.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning
honest amusement..........................
I should certainly like to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I do not want to buy it as dear as it costs. My intention is to pass pleasantly, and not laboriously, what life I have left. There is nothing for which I want to rack my brain, not even knowledge, however great its value.
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 10
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