I still have.......................

 

................................a lot of work to do.

indulging.....................

 

     The house gives signs of enjoying the emptiness.  It is rearranging itself after the night, clearing its pipes and cracking its joints.  This dignified and seasoned creature, with its coppery veins and wooden feet nestled in a bed of clay, has endured much: balls bounced against its garden flanks, doors slammed in rage, headstands attempted along its corridors, the weight and sighs of electrical equipment and the probings of inexperienced plumbers into its innards.  A family of four shelters in it, joined by a colony of ants around the foundations and, in spring time, by broods of robins in the chimney stack.  It also lends a shoulder to a frail (or just indolent) sweet-pea which leans against the garden wall, indulging the peripatetic courtship of a circle of bees.

     The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness.

-Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

On making the cut...........................

........................................................a very important hiring tip.

via

Highly recommended.................

As a history major, I am sort of embarrassed by the gaps in my knowledge.  The Reconstruction era and the fate of the freed slaves post-Appomattox is an unhappy ugly chapter in American history.  As Chernow tells it, there is clearly a national amnesia about that era.  If I learned about it in school, well, I didn't.

At 959 pages, Chernow might have benefited from a stronger editor.  Still, he tells a tale crucial to the understanding of the United States of America.

On symbols and knowing............

     Symbols are only the vehicle of communication;  they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference.  No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding.  Hence the personality or personalities of God - whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or apocalyptic vision - no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing.  The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.  "For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that His is far above all that man can possibly think of God."  And in the Kena Upanisad, in the same spirit:  "To know is not to know; not to know is to know."  Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.

-Joseph Campbell, as excerpted from The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Don't know about you, but I had to look up henotheistic.  Short cut here.

Things you should know......................