Words fail........................

 

Edward Hopper    Soir Bleu      1914     oil on canvas

If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

-Edward Hopper

the winding ill-lit stairway of our life...........

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable.  The mistake is to describe it.  Jankélévitch is right about music.  He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words.  Fauré's F sharp Ballade is an example; so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. . . . Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.  These moments are precious to us.  When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across an open window, through which, we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

moved..........................

 

   thanks David

unfortunate conflations.................

      For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase "I see what you mean" is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can't see.  This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.  It's nuts in several different dimensions all at once.  Setting aside the unfortunate conflations inherent in the concept of ableism, which aggregates together conditions that have no business being aggregated together, this prohibition insults blind people, pretends to misunderstand the way language works, and is fundamentally unserious.  It insults blind people and those with reduced vision because it assumes that they are incredibly sensitive and fragile, that if they come into contact with a perfectly common turn of phrase they've encountered their whole lives, they will be broken by it.  As is true of so many contemporary progressive norms, this prohibition belittles and condescends to the very people it ostensibly honors.  I have a disability myself, a mental illness.  I am not hurt of offended by people using the word "crazy," because I am not so fragile as that and because I know how language works.

-Fredrik DeBoer, How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

words.........................

 

Sometimes you just have to stay silent because no words can explain what’s going on in your heart and mind.

-attributed to Maanayata Dutt

via

air moving..................

 Someone has insulted you?  You mean, rather, that you allowed them to insult you.

     Because regardless of their intention, what they say is just air moving between the two of you.  Their words become an insult only if you regard them as such.  Otherwise, they are the uttering of a fool.

     Try, therefore, not to be bewildered by appearances, and instead take a break from the situation, put some distance between yourself and the immediate impression.  That way you will find that it is easier to retain command of your ruling faculty, your ability to reason.

-Massimo Pigliucci, A Field Guide to a Happy Life

A pretty good explanation...................

 ...........................of the concept of "Woke".

learned a new word today.............

 The concept of iatrogenesis, native to medicine, describes misfortunes that would not occur but for one’s interaction with medicine itself. For example, the case of COVID you catch in the doctor’s waiting room or the elective surgery that impinges on a vein, which throws a clot, causing a stroke. Shockingly, medical iatrogenesis is the fifth leading cause of death worldwide.

Journalism’s iatrogenic damage may be less dramatic, but it is surely more pervasive because there is no escape from exposure. Avoid consuming news and you still will be passively subject to the media’s effect on your environment.

-Steve Salerno, as culled from this post

Some random selections......................

..........................from Michael Wade's Random Thoughts: Brief Reflections and Moments of Clarity:

"Don't think weakness discourages attacks."

"Listen to fools but don't argue with them."

"Some of the most dangerous people are those who want to save the world."

"One of the challenges of life is overcoming the effects of high school."

"You need to thank someone today."

"On occasion, all of us are dumber than one of us."

"Evaluating a nation by contrasting it with a utopia is a common distortion."

"Never hire anyone who is abusive to the powerless."

"We can do much better than we think we can but first we must think we can."

Fifty years ago..........................

The Bee Gees................................................Words

Schadenfreude...............Part 2

Learned a new word today..............

Fun with the language............

Not sure exactly what the phrase means (I suspect Fred borrowed the word from Spanish), but one can use one's imagination: 

The anger is dangerous because it is not visible. The rigorous censorship we call “political correctness” prevents expression of ideas disliked by the ruling classes. It leads to surprises. It is why the Talking Heads were consistently, universally, and utterly wrong about Donald Trump’s chances of being elected. They continue to suffer from this cerebrocolonic congruence.

-as taken from here

Careful..................................

9.  Verbal delusion arises when words do not conform to reality.

-from The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali:  How to Know God

On conventions...........................

 “What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth … In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are ‘coins’ for real things.”

-Alan Watts

This is good to know..............

"I do not believe, however, that a clear distinction can be made between psychological and social aspects when dealing with a phenomenon such as boredom, and a reductive sociologism is just as untenable as a psychologism."

-Lars Svendsen,  A Philosophy of Boredom

Learned a new word today...........

Improving my vocabulary................

.................................................................one word at a time.

IT WILL BE ADMITTED by the least charitable reader that the entertainment value of Mr. Keynes' General Theory of Employment is considerably enhanced by its satiric aspect. But it is also clear that many readers have been left very bewildered by this Dunciad. Even if they are convinced by Mr. Keynes' arguments and humbly acknowledge themselves to have been "classical economists" in the past, they find it hard to remember that they believed in their unregenerate days the things Mr. Keynes says they believed. And there are no doubt others who find their historic doubts a stumbling block, which prevents them from getting as much illumination from the positive theory as they might otherwise have got.

-Sir John Hicks,  Mr Keynes and The Classics:  A Suggested Interpretation

I will confess to not knowing much about Keynes, other than his name gets tossed around a lot when economics is in the discussion mix.  His General Theory is loaded on my Kindle, but no investigative attempt has yet been made.  This essay from Hicks was found in the Intertunnel after Mervyn King made mention of it.  I'm thinking that Hicks is not a fan of Keynes, although further reading may prove that assumption incorrect.  Regardless, the word Dunciad was a new one for me. Described here, maybe most recognizable from here.  Enjoy.

Actions...........................

"You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator...We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them."

-Abigail Adams, from a letter to husband John

Smoke signals...........................

      There are a dozen things that must go right in order for communication to occur, and not all of them are under the speaker's control.  Because language is a communal act, as much depends on those who listen as on those who speak.  Every word is a smoke signal sent up with great effort.  The fire must be very hot.  The wood must be very green.  The wet blanket must be lowered and lifted at just the right moments.  But none of those is any guarantee.  If no one is watching the sky, you might as well be roasting marshmallows.  In order for communication to occur, you need someone who is watching who knows the language.
     Even a knowledgeable partner is no guarantee that the message sent will be the message received.  Language is porous, not solid.  Every word carries its own history inside of it.  A word such as charity does not mean the same thing now as it did a hundred years ago.  Depending on a listener's own history with the word, the hearing of it may evoke a glow of contentment or a flush of shame.  Send up a smoke signal that says "Practice Charity" and one person who sees it will go kiss her rebellious teenager while someone else will start rummaging through his closet for old clothes to give away.  A third, who is perhaps most typical of our age, will have not context for responding to the word at all.

-Barbara Brown Taylor,  When God is Silent