At the cinema..........................................Rocky
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Probably just a coincidence..................
Of course, much opposition to mass immigration possesses ugly nativist elements. But it’s also clear that recent waves of migration have done little to spark economic growth. Is it a coincidence that some of the countries with the highest per capita rates of immigration in recent years – including the UK, Canada, Germany, and France – have also been suffering from stagnant economies?
-Joel Kotkin, from this substack
Connection....................
Human connection is one of the most pressing problems in our world. In the U.S., loneliness has been rising steadily since the late 1970s.
We are lonely because we're missing connection. We're missing connection because we're struggling with its foundation: interaction.
Social skills are like muscles: without regular training, they atrophy.
-Adam Grant, from the prologue to Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World
If only someone would open a Piano Bar to help with interactions.
Monday, October 26, 2026
War.........................
He later was struck forcefully by "how rapidly the mind adjusts itself" to new circumstances, how contingent even the most fundamental truths seem to be. "I thought for awhile that I was dying, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world—The moment the hope of life returned it seemed as abhorrent to nature as ever that I should die." More matter-of-factly he recalled that "one of the thoughts that made it seem particularly hard to die was the recollection of several fair damsels whom I wasn't quite ready to leave."
-Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
The above being after Holmes was wounded at the Battle of Ball's Bluff. Holmes was also wounded at the Battle of Antietam. Budiansky enlightens us:
The Battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States Army, its casualties on that hot September day in the Maryland countryside twice those it would experience even in the D-Day landings against Nazi-occupied France. The morning of September 17, 1862, found Holmes's regiment encamped on the east side of the Antietam Creek a few miles outside the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. By seven thirty they were on the move . . .
The horrific casualties suffered by attacking forces throughout the Civil War was largely a result of the collision of traditional tactics with the vastly increased firepower of newer weapons; rifled muskets that could be accurately aimed to five hundred yards and lethal to a thousand yards, and cannon that could sweep the field with curtains of cannister shot.
On the sentimentalization of nature...........
Human beings are, of course, a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane. The cities of human beings are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters. The botanist Edgar Anderson has written wittily and sensitively in Landscape magazine from time to time about cities as a form of nature. "Over much of the world," he comments, "man has been accepted as a city-loving creature." Nature watching, he points out, "is quite as easy in the city as in the country; all one has to do is accept Man as part of Nature. Remember that as a specimen of Homo sapiens you are far and away most likely to find that species an effective guide to deeper understanding of natural history."
A curious but understandable thing happened in the eighteenth century. By then, the cities of Europeans had done well enough by them, mediating between them and many harsh aspects of nature, so that something became particularly possible which previously had been a rarity—sentimentalization of nature, or at any rate, sentimentalization of a rustic or barbarian relationship with nature. Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid was an expression of this sentimentality on one plane. The romantic idea of the "noble savage" was an even sillier one, on another plane. So, in this country, was Jefferson's intellectual rejection of cities of free artisans and mechanics, and his dream of an ideal republic of self-reliant rural yeomen—a pathetic dream for a good and great man whose land was tilled by slaves.
-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
sensibilities................
This is a case where mere fact isn't instructive. I had taken over the rowing and we were close to shore moving through reed and lily pad beds with the dog growling intermittently on the shore. It was already warm at eight in the morning and a slight breeze kept the clouds of mosquitoes enshrouded in the forest. Fred was peeling a hard-boiled egg drawn from a cooler and dosing it with Tabasco. I had just asked a mawkish theological question about Mary Magdalene, a query about forgiveness attached to this woman in part because I was a virgin at sixteen and imaged Mary Magdalene to be a haunted seductress, her robes parted wantonly for those who took interest and gave her a few coins. This boat incident took place over thirty years ago and I see bits of eggshells floating on the shaded water. Fred was tired and irritable from driving north all night.
"That's your main problem," he said. "You can't have religion without belief. You're just using your religion to decorate your life to protect you from your father. It's like your mother flying down to Chicago to go to a dress shop, say something pastel pink for Easter when the Lord was said to arise. That's no better than your dad driving from Marquette to Duluth to fuck one of his fifteen-year-olds. What I am saying is that you can't be playing around with your Christianity like it was a tool kit to keep you going. How does that make you any better than your dad? Right now you'd give your left nut for an hour with Mary Magdalene." Fred was making light of my recent religious conversion wherein my soul was saved at the fundamentalist Baptist church, an event that offended my family's Episcopalian sensibilities including Fred's.
-Jim Harrison, True North
Sunday, October 25, 2026
Things he's learned.......................
John Wooden wrote, “ Make each day your masterpiece.” This is great advice to live by. Since you can only have one “master” piece - this also means make each day better than the last.
Sixty years ago........................................
On the TV............Mission Impossible debuts
Coyote's Law...........................
Don't give the government a power that you would not like your worst political enemy to wield
-Warren Meyer, from this post
The wildest bet...............
You wouldn’t have bet on it,
the battered rock
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
wouldn’t have guessed
that it would bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it would mushroom
mountains and minds,
-Maria Popova, from the opening of her poem The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet (found in its entirety here)
Enoughness....................
Enoughness is a completely internal state. It stems from your past and the stories you tell yourself about who you are.
-Jordan Grumet, from this substack on the Treadmills of the Unfulfilled
That is some theme.......................
A key theme of my work in the technology critic space is that a life without serious, sustained, intentional thought is impoverished. Thinking is how we make sense of ourselves and the world, and is how we imagine new horizons and create the key elements of our future. It’s at the heart of philosophy, theology, and human empathy; the ability that separates our species from all other animals.
-Cal Newport, from this post
the freedom of getting it wrong.................
In both cases, language was being treated as a mere technology for completing a task or satisfying a tester, not as a route to self-expression or understanding. Once literacy is reduced to the correct ordering of words to produce sentences, it becomes unclear why one would care whether the order is one’s own. It is also unclear why one would choose to study human languages and literature, if they are taught and learned no differently from math or computer science, as a matter of right and wrong answers.
-William Davies, from this essay on reading and writing and language
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Sixty years ago................................
At the cinema.........The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Love.......................
But this was not the end of my love for Mattie Chatham. After the figments of presumption and delusion had fallen away and I again saw myself as I was and my circumstances as they were, I loved her more, and more clearly, than I did before. I became able to imagine her as she was and not as the subject of a dream. In my thoughts of her, she stood apart from me. I seemed to see her whole. When I realized the futility and absurdity of my old self-begotten desire, that was when the arrow struck. It entered my heart, and I could not pull it out. The hopelessness of my love became the sign of its permanence.
So it is that the life force, may take possession of a man—so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Noticing....................
The mind is lazy. It has trained itself to ignore everything except those things that scare it or please it. By forcing the mind to notice things, you engage it, telling it you want to be aware of life, and to claim back that which has been lost. By stimulating the five senses, you bridge to the extrasensory perception of the subtle body. In addition, by stopping to notice, you place yourself more firmly inside this incarnation as a human. . . .It's important that life doesn't just wash past you—so a day becomes a week, a month a year, and suddenly you're old and gray and dead! By stopping to notice, you are requiring the mind to come back from its world, its pleasures and needs, and enter another world—the real world of observation and comprehension.
-Stuart Wilde, Sixth Sense
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
