.......................................public service.
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Optimistic infection..................
Much of modern society, including our endlessly fragmented media, protects us from having to truly engage with those who don’t share our politics.
That’s why the development of a political rift between the genders is so promising. What’s the most compelling common project of all? Sex - sex and love. Short of a mass conversion to homosexuality, many or most of these people are still going to hook up together and form partnerships and families, caveats about declining birth rates aside. Conservative-leaning young men who only seek out conservative-leaning young women will be fishing in a small pool; liberal women will only diminish the size of their pool if they stick to men who are as liberal as they are. Both sides therefore have a powerful incentive to forge relationships with people who hold political views different to their own. They can then infect each other with their different ideas, generating new syntheses, and moving us all along.
-as culled from this Ian Leslie post
Friday, February 9, 2024
Fifty years ago........................
Thursday, February 8, 2024
choices...........................
Now that the proposition of crossing Antarctica by myself had taken hold, my choices were to see it through or to live with regret for the rest of my life. . . .
I wasn't sure what worried me more; skiing 1,700 kilometers or spending two months alone.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
connections................
By being truly alone I had seen how deeply reliant I am on human ties and in ways that were unexpected. It was not simply a matter of having company to pass the time, or backup in case of emergency. During the expedition, I found that the absence of others had shaped my behaviour, my thoughts, my actions, my reasoning. I had seen for myself that it is human relationships that bind us to places, time, and purpose, human relationships that make us who we are as individuals and that our contentment, and our happiness, depend on those precious human connections.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
alone-ness..................
Now that my alone-ness was coming to an end, I could enjoy the solitude and the isolation. I had Antarctica to myself and I liked it that way. I let my mind explore the prospect of seeing other people, of being back at Union Glacier surrounded by company, and I became aware of my instincts shying away from the idea.
I had to laugh out loud at my own caprice, shaking my head in exasperation. I had struggled with alone-ness for all this time and now here I was sentimentalising it.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
On perseverance.....................
It was clear to me that the success of my expedition had not depended on physical strength or dramatic acts of bravery but on the fact that at least some progress—however small—had been made every single day. It had not been about glorious heroism but the humblest of qualities, a quality that perhaps we all too often fail to appreciate for its worth - that of perseverance. Critical to skiing across Antarctica had been the distinctly unimpressive and yet, for me, incredibly demanding challenge of finding the will to get out of the tent each and every morning. If I had failed in that most fundamental of tasks, then my expedition would have been over. . . .
Keep getting out of the tent.
-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica
laughter.............................
"Laughter," he says, "and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears."
-William B. Irvine, channeling Cato in A Guide to the Good Life
deny..........................
We must deny that there is any appropriate time for an inappropriate action.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
While checking in with.............
...........................friend Greg at Sippican Cottage, this beauty was found:
Some people nail it. And nail it to the church door, too.
Which led me to find Beatty's monologue. Enjoy.
The script is here:
Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
Beale: I have seen the face of God.
Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.
Checking in...................
................................with Alain de Botton:
Maturity: The confidence to have no opinions on many things.
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have.
Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us.
Fifty years ago..........................
Bob Seger................................Seven (the album)
a loose connection...............
They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all. It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.
-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)
some capacity...............
Since it has pleased God to give us some capacity for reason, so that we should not be, like the animals, slavishly subjected to the common laws, but should apply ourselves to them by judgment and voluntary liberty, we must indeed yield a little to the simple authority of Nature, but not let ourselves be carried away tyrannically by her: reason alone must guide our inclinations.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8
On not playing small........................
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-Marianne Williamson, as transcribed from here
raison d'etre........................
People who tell children that their school days are their best days must, I think, be very unhappy themselves and terribly frustrated.
The world is a school. "He has put eternity into a man's mind"; and we seem to "know" that our destiny, indeed our true raison d'etre, is something bigger and finer and more splendid than what this world can offer.
On theories............................
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
-attributed to Karl Popper
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
