Genesis 1

Every seeded plant for food. Allocation. Dominion as distinct from free possession. But mainly, placement.

held

You are not forsaken.

Ein deutsches Requiem versus Zeppelin Feld

We are so constituted that we take direct delight in the emergence of order from chaos, whatever may be its end. With Job's morning stars and angels, we burst out singing and shout for joy.

Oh, that the just may come to know it as the wicked do!

Ein deutsches Requiem

Hold your hands in front of you. Let palm face palm, a few inches apart. A box is perceived between the two hands. That box is the moral universe, and your hands, our sense of good and evil.

no problem

When religious, I never went far into the 'problem of evil' issue, partly because it never struck me as dire. It seemed to assume a relatively high weight to the resulting attendant human (and other) suffering. But that weighting, in the mind of God (or a God), isn't knowable except by the assertion (or revelation) that it is weighty. And that isn't useful: what we'd need to know is the relative weight of human suffering compared to the weightiness of producing an interesting human world (for which one needs both good and evil), or of having an exposition (for which things need to play out), and so on.

In other words, the 'problem' of evil is largely the 'problem' of suffering, but there are things worth suffering for in our conception (achievement, freedom, etc.), and the same things, when necessary, are worth permitting others to suffer for - again, in our conception. So it would be no surprise if God had things that were, in his conception, worth making us suffer for.

The problem of evil becomes a productive subject, however, when we step back and consider it in relation to how people accommodate themselves to religion. This is why the problem of evil becomes is more pronounced for a liberal than a conservative theologian.

In fact, this latter point can be backed into a point that isn't specifically religious. One crude account of the conservative impulse (contrasted with libertarian or progressive impulses) is that it flows from, and in proportion to, the considered view that human evil is widespread, salient, and persistent - in which case virtue had better set its jaw, gird up the loins of its mind, and set out into the world armed to the teeth.

My own view, admittedly a heuristic in the absence of solid evidence, is that any human individual, institution, or community is, by default, unless shown otherwise, to be taken as exactly half evil, half good, with the halves admixed: neither offering a division of each in two nor resolving into a third state neither good nor evil. This balance does strange things to conservative, libertarian, or progressive assumptions, and stranger things still to the implicit formulae that result from those assumptions. Those strange things are, I tell you, my convictions. They are why I must be an exile from politics, from religion, and from the other thoughtful societies - my thoughts are sports, neither hybrid nor purebred.

Epstein

Yes, each act of compassion should weighed against the cumulative negative consequences. But since this lesson sticks with the stingy and eludes the generous, it is not well to teach it. That is, whether to teach the weighing habits of law-and-economics be determined in part by questioning whether the teaching act would pass the test that is taught. And that is the path from law-and-economics to Strauss.

perfect answer

Mr. Mayor, a reporter demanded, do you regret the response to the snowstorm?

Mr. Bloomberg, deadpanning: “You know, I regret everything in this world.”

mystery

If there are eternal questions, it is happenstance if mankind knows any of them. Our persistent questions result from, rather than whisper beneath, our social, specific lives.

robe

Uniforms show the beauty, in its place, of impersonality.

displacement

I do not know whether it is because most important questions cannot be absolutely decided, but I do know that the natural state of man involves a great deal of conflict - one might even say that war is man's natural state. But 'conflict' is the more accurate term, because it sets up the true social choice: not between war and peace, but between two kinds of conflict: between violent conflict and verbal, legal and other nonviolent conflict. That we live in a society filled with the latter more than the former is a great blessing, and indicates the true social value of the seemingly craven corporate banker, lawyer -- Wall Streeter. These are, even in their worse days, engaging in a kind of nonviolent conflict and pillage that crowds out a great deal of what would otherwise be bloodshed. It is a case of a lesser evil that is the best seal against a greater evil. Of course there is a great deal of directly virtuous work to be done to keep this state of affairs manageable and tolerable.

felt

One great threat to integrity is that it feels something like success to say "I will succeed"; and something like spiritual integrity to say "I have decided to follow Jesus". That the thought feels something like the doing - or at least it does to those who have never felt the done deed - reduces the incentives to do.

from John Donne

She, she is dead; she's dead: when thou knowest this,
Thou knowest how poor a trifling thing man is,
And learn'st thus much by our anatomy,
The heart being perish'd, no part can be free,
And that except thou feed (not banquet) on
The supernatural food, religion,
Thy better growth grows withered, and scant;
Be more than man, or thou'rt less than an ant.
Then, as mankind, so is the world's whole frame
Quite out of joint, almost created lame,
For, before God had made up all the rest,
Corruption ent'red, and deprav'd the best;
It seiz'd the angels, and then first of all
The world did in her cradle take a fall,
And turn'd her brains, and took a general maim,
Wronging each joint of th'universal frame.
The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then
Both beasts and plants, curs'd in the curse of man.
So did the world from the first hour decay,
That evening was beginning of the day,
And now the springs and summers which we see,
Like sons of women after fifty be.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

another political one

Yes, a democracy results in poor policy outcomes, and routinely so. It's simply that, on balance, those poor choices kill and injure fewer people, and do less other damage, than would result from not having a democracy.

The project of constitutional government is to configure the democracy so as to perpetuate and extend its blessings while mitigating its harms.

a political one

I'm for an immigration system with four key characteristics:

1. A person who tries long enough, hard enough, scrupulously enough, and lacks demerits, should eventually be able to immigrate and, later, naturalize. The process for such a person may and should be lengthy and tedious, but should not be costly.
2. There should be a material bias in favor of family reunification.
3. There should be a means for rapid and effective humanitarian movement.
4. There should be a very substantial bias in favor of academic and professional merit -- academically and professionally meritorious persons should have every incentive to live here.
5. There should be a high, but absolute, limit on immigrant volume, keyed to the national population.

the old kind

Consider the ant, yes, and the blackberry.

also true

Just another pretty face.

true

I don't want to teach you a lesson, quite. I want to change your mind.

on the subway platform

Regarding some theatrical stunt gone wrong:

Man to woman: "Oh my God, he fell how far?"
Woman: "At least 20 feet. They took him to the hospital. People were screaming"
Man: "I hope he's ok, but I wish I had been there to see that. Is that wrong?"

Yes, it's wrong. In fact, it's straightforwardly evil, the sort of evil common to us all. Rubbernecking is (slightly) more defensible, because there is a slight avoidance motive.

we

Man really is a social animal. Add people, serious interactions, to my day, and I get better, I elevate - even if I don't enjoy it.

grip

The need for some certainty is a great cause of self-deception, but truly a need all the same. Not everyone will be satisfied with acknowledged heuristics and mental habits. Most will want to lean on something felt to be so.

now

One of the benefits of reading history is to realize that, all in all, we (the large, global we) live in the best time yet. (At least that we know of since widespread civilization, I mean.)

Senate at 3pm.

Happiness. Thankful.

struck

It is probably unanswerable, and almost certainly inarticulable, but: What is happening when we are sexually attracted to strangers by sight? There is little knowledge of their personality (but some, from their carriage, attire and expression), no direct knowledge of their fecundity, and so on. Why are some people attracted to tall women, or red haired men, or high cheekbones, or powerful legs, or deep set eyes? One senses deeper waters, simultaneously more animal, more calculating, and more instant - indeed this is the topic that leads most easily into an intuition of the unconscious mind and self.

common

Nearly all politicized dispute and debate about science actually treats the boundary between common knowledge and esoteric knowledge. It isn't about what is or isn't so. In a democracy it is about the knowledge base of the voter, especially.

Take creationism versus evolution and aligned old-earth theories. If there were any factual plausibility -- even a small one -- to the creation and flood account, the mineral and oil industry would use it to price fields and predict valuable deposit locations. Nobody - not even a oil or mineral executive with a deep personal religious commitment to biblical inerrancy - will put real money on the flood account being true, or even on it being plausible. Contrast that with biblical references to ancient civilizations, towns, kings, battles and so forth. These are occasionally perfect in their accuracy, often partly true, sometimes invented. That's more than enough plausibility to motivate archaeologists to inform their digs partly using biblical material. If the creation and flood story were in the same "sometimes true, often plausible" category as the stories of ancient Israel, they too would be used for predictive purposes. But they are not.

So the debate over evolution in schools isn't about whether evolution is so. It is about keeping evolution out of the body of common knowledge. The motivation for this isn't necessarily bad. Although I do think evolution should be forthrightly taught in schools, I also recognize that some truths carry dangerous implications, and that bad moral implications can be and have been improperly but easily derived from natural selection. So I have patience for a debate over whether evolution should be taught, even though I have little patience for a non-scientific debate over whether evolution is so.

Now take an intermediate case: climate change. Here again, the serious money (the insurance and real estate industries) speaks clearly: there is a real risk here, although nothing like a certainty as to severity of effects. Will there be dire climate change? We do not know. Is there a serious risk of dire climate change? Yes.

The debate over climate change thus falls into two categories: the first treats likely outcomes, mitigating policies and efforts and the general probabilities. That's the genuine policy arena. Then there's the question of whether climate change is bogus - this is really a question about the boundary between common knowledge and esoteric knowledge, motivated by voting effects.

Most knowledge can't and shouldn't be part of common knowledge - there's only so much that will be known right across the range of normal adults in a society. But what gets in, is important for just that reason. Celebrity versus salience.

hen

The most useful and beautiful falsehood I know - the myth I'd most want to be true - is that there is a benevolent omniscience above who stores away every secret or hidden or quiet human virtue, remembers these forever, and delights in them.

regulation

The trouble with paternalistic regulations - even necessary ones - is that rational motivations are often obscure and various. Far better to have somewhat arbitrary regulations that people can work around, if need be, whenever such will still serve the purpose.

autonomic

My instincts about people and situations wax and wane according to a sense of their needfulness that is not subject to my will.

silky

The differences among the the attractive, the erotic and the pornographic are as interlocking, and yet as sharp - and indeed the same as - the distinctions among the social, the individually human, and the animal. They are as the web, the spider, and the fly.

kidding

Nobody thinks that. Nobody.

boilerplate

Why do I tolerate dreary things? Because they are the moat around the real.

post

Why is advertising so often of high quality? It isn't that we're a consumer culture. It's that we're a culture with few competing public images. Few altarpieces, few totems.

oh

I acknowledge a silent, background sadness that the world, and that I, disappoint. To let this sadness remain, quiet and undriving, true but never central, seems the best way.

over lunch

A conversation with a friend is a sure joy.

solvent

Love need not be mutual to be love. But it must be mutual and intelligent if it is not to be too cruel and degrading. Love, real but mishandled, can make a man into a pet, then dog, then worm: finally a zero, or, more precisely, a pure, notional object.

don't read this - it's dense and unclear

Most of my view of the world is conventional. Now, I don't usually put it so plainly, but the part of my world view that is unusual is the conviction that important systems, ideas and cultures never really work - at best, they muddle through and achieve mitigated successes at a tolerable cost (significant but bearable waste, cruelty, etc.). And, therefore, that the ways and means of muddling through are more valuable than the ways and means of vaulting success. Also, therefore, that a knowledge of where, when and how things fail, and a focus on building systems that can fail non-catastrophically, are of very high value. And finally, therefore, that significant acknowledged shortcomings are not a sufficient reason to accept a proposal to do or refrain.

This is an intrinsically moderate position, in this sense:

• a conservative view is that we live in an order that exists underneath all our corrupting troublemaking, and that order would work well if only people would comply with and live out that order;
• a liberal view is that we live in a broken order that warps our fundamentally decent selves, and our decency would shine through if only the order were reformed to allow people to flourish.
  

My position is that what is made bent can never be straight, and that our human world is made of somewhat - but not very - bent stuff: ourselves.

It's also a position with its own peculiar weaknesses. Here's just one: nothing works suggests an idea of high function, and I ambivalently borrow those ideas from conservatives and liberals (I don't mean to polarize thought along political dimensions, but the axis orients this particular explanation nicely). The conservative system that works is a natural order, at bottom. The liberal system that works nourishes expression, at bottom. (Order and fertility are the poles of human effort, but that's another subject.) No human system reliably and sustainably results in either. But these ideals are exterior to my own conception. Muddling through - if you were tendentious and out to show me up - could very well be said to work, as muddling through.

My reply would be that my view of the world is moderate, but my ideals and dreams are liberal and conservative. Nothing works, said by an optimist, is a view that has to borrow it's ideals to function. And that's a weakness.

basic

Democracy's value is in social stabilization through legitimization without appeal to an external standard. Democracy's value does not lie in its effect on good governance.

James Franco

If narcissism's so bad, then why am I so beautiful?

bureau, yet again

Generally speaking, the functions best carried out in our society are those performed by institutions whose professionals are adequately compensated in money and security, but well compensated in interest, salience and recognition of work.

my hope

Craig Ferguson said it well: "The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

loosening

Earthworms creep, aerate the soil,
Enrich and break apart what they
Ingest along the way.

For this we value them.

Hope aerates the fields that lie before us,
Puts heart into us to till and turn, saying
Our plows will not be broken,
Our seeds will not smother,
Harvest will come, in season.

Hope, as an attitude merely,
Obscures rational expectation,
And is blinders to the horses among us
Who must trod, and trod:
Hope is mercy to them.

But hope, as a loosening of expectancy,
Is no mere attitude, but an ever-creeping
Function, deep in the fertile mind.
And there, may it be a healthy multitude;
Make more workable what reason sets upon;
Increase reason's scope, broadcasting seeds:
That rise to shoot, then ear, then full grain within the ear.

buddy

There is more to money, but less to consuming it for yourself, than you think.

sure

We want adventure, outward if possible, but if not - within.

of A

Practically nothing of importance works, nor could it be otherwise. An important system that suffices is a success.

Gorgon

Is there a sight that would kill? Not a gorgon nor the almighty, but an actual, available sight?

probably wrong

This is probably wrong, but I can't think of a counterexample and anyhow it is trivial:

Anything that is cute may, by a slight change, be made scary. But most of what is scary cannot easily be made cute.

punt

Early September was, long ago. A green breath, it took in the end to summer's troubles and knew nothing of tomorrow's changes.

lick

Decoration is as proper to design as salt is to to a boiled egg, and in about the same proportion.

noise, heat, fuzz

The primary layer of abstraction is vital. And abstractions of abstractions are occasionally necessary, sometimes of use. But further abstractions upon abstracted abstractions are seldom of use, often very dangerous, and carry - moreover - the ordinary dangers even beneficial abstractions carry.

I do not mean to preclude grand theories. Even an ideology may be of use, on balance. But the good grand theories and the useful ideologies, with all their heft and sweep, lie close upon the phenomena, even as an atmosphere clings to its planet.

vampiry

I believe in the usefulness of capitalism expressed into creative play upon a fair market: the marketplace as such. What I do not believe in is efficient market capitalism, whereby a marketplace becomes a unitized and abstracted rudiment of a model that then parades the ability to read the slope of a graph as if that were capitalism. That is not. That is either (benign) a study upon a marketplace, or (malign) a silent vampiry upon the market.

There are many reliable tests of which of those is in operation. The easiest: are greedy men, by their greed, producing usefully, allowing that the use may be subtle?

good breeding

Congregational religion can breed raw populism into civil democracy.

maybe

A peaceful and open society persisting over more than a generation is typically a precondition to widespread political rationality, although hardly a sufficient one, nor - fortunately - even quite a necessary one. This, as much as anything culturally specific, accounts for the post-colonial advantages many democracies experience after their revolutions.

trick question

Does living in a free country mean you have the right to be taken advantage of?

Yes, it's a trick question. But it's also a hard question.

can't buy

Money is enabling. No question about it.

what I am thankful for

I can be better
Without being bigger.

You can be better
Without the prod of pride.

We can be better
By tending what we have.

She can be better
Tell her she is her own.

He can be better
Take none of what is his.

It can be better
As we each tend our plots.

They will be better
When their neighbors are.

Service's Stalin

The productivity of a productive evil man may be interesting. The fitful self-collection of a cowardly man may be interesting. But the evil of an evil man, and the cowardice of those around him -- are not interesting. They merely wait for the septic needfulness of death in this wicked world.

the fall

I want a car
Because it makes me feel good
To have one
And not because I need it.

likewise

Money workers should get paid. Food workers should get fed. Care givers should get love. Interrogators should get tape recorded. Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the grain.

alas

My sentiments are conservative even if most of my views are not. And that conservatism is of a national bent. Put it this way: my feelings want, contrary to fact, something like a Baptist, perhaps even a Mormon, cosmos to exist.

invasive

Action despite incomplete knowledge - often despite considerable ignorance - is a necessary part of life. Certainly we try to increase our understanding and decrease the need to leap into the dark. But we are still often called to decisive action despite substantial uncertainty and ignorance.

Heuristics are called for: morals, mythologies, beliefs. And that's why I can't, as an agnostic, simply say I don't care what other people believe. What we believe, privately, has a profound public impact because our beliefs inform necessary acts in the absence of (or in the teeth of) full, true knowledge.

corner

It is in my veins now; I feel the strong, silent passions again. I am terribly awake.

Peniel

Oh yes, I will put away childish things. I will work upon this world. I will till it and have it yield. I will wrestle with the soil until it blesses me and those I love.

more learned

And why joie de vue? Chiefly because we must treat time as a path down which we walk by our own feet, by our own power, with our own will to progress even though, in truth, time will carry us, conveyor like, whether or not we press forward. But we must own the progression of time in our lives: take the future as something to reach, and not just to let arrive.

I am not timber, clamped to a belt that ratchets towards the buzz saw of death. I am a man, and I will walk all the way, by my own feet, to my own purposes, and be in possession of my time, until I am cut asunder.

I will own myself and leave others glad that it is I and not they, and not fate, and none other, that so owns. I will reverence will; I will reverence love. I'll walk. Nobody and nothing will carry me but that which cannot be stopped, and even then, I will moonwalk upon the conveyer belt of time, as if the passage of my hours were by my own two feet.

what I have learned

What I have learned over the last month is that human expectation is maladapted to time. For time, in fact, is our storehouse: we should fill the racks in sequence, placing the largest items first, letting the smaller items fill the surrounding space, and putting the most awkward items nearest their use or exit, leaving the weildy items to fill the crannies.

But this is not what we do - we treat time not like a warehouse but as a vantage, and clear all impediments to our view of the desired next. Great open vistas, airy boulevards of time stretching to it, but at great cost in productivity.

A middle way is required - to self-discipline and redemption of the time, packing in the work, but also to permitting a certain joie de vue.

bureau again

There is a self-serving variety of self-control that I commend to myself now: to let the leaven work, to have the full loaf, but in due season.

malaprop

Eventually I stale to a task. That misuses 'stale', but none the less what I mean and feel.

fortune cookie

Nobody is good at everything; and those who excel at something excel in little else. Play to your strengths, even as you address your weaknesses.

before next

Expectation makes the interval sag, a the telephone line sags between two old pine poles, weeping tar. This is because inwardly, we tend to measure time from event to event, and not as a clock does.

steely georgian

That we are stuck with others as they are, and ourselves much as we are, sets the outer space, the surrounding void, to our will, which exists on an improbably hospitable and extensive planet of human possibility, both of hope and despair.

policy versus polity

Well, yes, of course it chills renumerated efforts to make a tax code more progressive. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it less good. And everyone likes to spend money that isn't their own. But where is the population mature enough for these and a thousand such observations? Nowhere in time or place. This is the policy point of bureacracy - to create a space, itself costly and distorting, to be sure, for these truths to have a bearing.

parade

It is rare to get an external view of one's intimate friends, and hardly helpful to friendship.

becalmed

I am rarely depressed in the sense of being emotionally down. But I do have periods - stretches of days - in which I am befogged and becalmed, all told.

magnificat

Haunting, profound, and great: that the proud be cursed to be scattered in the imaginations of their own hearts.

fujimori

Scientists and engineers can make fine politicians, but are disproportionately among those who become tyrannical. And that is no suprise.

obvious

Young men unemployed: trouble.

bureau

We do not live in a dystopian world, although there is a great deal of dysfunction, and a significant amount of evil. I would rather live now than in any prior age, if the choice of where I were to be placed were made random per capita (that is, if I had an equal chance of ending up as a person here or there, male or female, sick or healthy, etc.). Obviously if I could pick who I'd end up being, what body and brain I'd comprise, and so on, I might choose something else (to be Abigail Adams?). But realistically, we - the larger we - are the blessed of the ages.

more today

The ennobling is directional, of course, as I've long said. The vote ennobles people, rather than people ennobling their votes.

today

For all my hesitance about democracy, and certainty about its many limits, I remain convinced of the value and superiority of democracy over other forms of government experienced by man. And I remain a lover of its dignification of man, of the romance - and how it romances me - of the polling place, of the vote, of the school cafeteria and folding tables made noble.

next two

A transition succeeds or fails by preservation of momentum coming into the turn, and the application of acceleration coming into the new straightaway.

next

One must come upon a chance, a wonderful chance, first as one who would catch a bird, unawares, but then, as Jacob who would wrest a blessing.

workplace

You play chieftan, and I'll be your priest.

zeppelin

A strong argument for maintaining a degree of ritual in society is that doing so acclimates - and in some measure desensitizes - people to ritual force. A society without ritual leaves people with a compelling yearning that becomes the more powerful, if suddenly engaged, for being unfamiliar. But of course a ritualized society also reinforces the power of ritual. There's a happy minimum of background ritual to be maintained.

lawyer

One way I am more persuasive is by picking up the personae strewn about in each institution. That I am, in saying and urging something, also being something. One reason lawyers occupy such a rich set of jokes is that it is so entirely and wonderfully a role.

beadle

Exception spotting is a weak and faulty form of policy reasoning, made strong by it intuitiveness.

words

Beautiful electronic words: transistor, diode, capacitor, fuse, resistor, rheostat, solenoid, transformer.

hire

Why Wikipedia works: that's a worthwhile subject of thought.

orlando

Evil, as the cliche suggests, really is usually banal. And even when it is not, it tends towards banality. Which is not to equate the two. Most banality is neither of nor from evil. But banality that is not from evil does have this danger: that it diminishes the difference of evil from good.

punctuation

I am drawn to the dash because I hear what I read and hear what I write.

All punctuation is, fundamentally, acoustic, not just at the moment of placement, but as a capitulation of the swell or ebb that preceded. But the dash is the most purely oral, most purely paratactic, of all standard contemporary punctuation -- the least syntactic, the least logic-plated: the least like a colon. (But lordy: I do like my colons!)

There used to be a rival to the dash for pure acoustic indication: that peculiarly poetic comma that grew from the King James translation's focus on church scripture readings. The comma of playwrights and politicians and preachers.

next

We are wired to react. Do you want to get something out of someone? Give them the occasion and path to react.

serve

We are all, to varying degrees, fitted out for devotion. And figuring out what to do about this is one of the personal projects that we each, with more or less awareness, must muddle through.

practice

I'm at an Orlando hotel split about evenly between tourists and convention goers (I'm a convention goer).

Stepping out of my room a moment ago, I saw a bit of good parenting.

An affluent father with a dear little 5-year-old in tow approaches the housekeeper wheeling her cart down the hall.

Father: "Excuse me, ma'am, did you clean the rooms down this hall?"

Housekeeper: "Yes."

Father to daughter: "Okay, Sheila, go ahead and ask her."

The girl hesitates, but then says, "Excuse me, ma'am, but I put a Disney bag in the trashcan in our room." (She's been practicing.)

The girl bites her lip, her father takes her little hand, and he finishes the thought: "If it's not to much trouble, could you look for it?"

The housekeeper reaches into her bin and finds it after a few seconds' rummaging. She hands it to the child.

The little girl catches her breath, takes the little plastic bag, and after a moment hugs the housekeeper's leg and cries out: "Oh, thank you, thank you."

And I slip past.

He's a good dad. His "Excuse me, ma'am" was a simple bit of modeling, and effective. He had had already led his daughter into taking responsibility. A good showing all around, with a sweet and easy happy ending, too.

chords

What in us is so easily moved by the rescue of distant miners? This correspondence of emotion is beautiful, but a sign of so much that is dangerous and weak in us, too.

bone carving

Strange to realize that cultures sometimes regress technologically. That seafarers, on reaching an island, may become a tribe, bound to the land. Or that the ability to make the tools that are buried with ancestors may become lost to those who follow.

Neither is common: both are possible. Even in the absense of calamity, technological advance does not always ratchet forward.

work aright

It is in some ways mere word play, but a profession is a sort of faith, an orientation to preserve in a swarm of small acts that all, like iron filings, must point to the poles. This is what makes a true lawyer or doctor unlike a non-professional who does the same work. A doctor or lawyer is freely and truly bound.

porphyry

War, even a good war, is mostly coarsening for the soldier and the populace. War, even a bad war, is mostly ennobling for the commanders and political leaders. And this is the great threat to a war-fighting democracy, as a democracy. Starting with its Revolution, America has become less democratic by each successive war. Fortunately, counteracting developments (expanding enfranchisement and popular education, diversity and wealth, mostly) have greatly mitigated (but also complicated) the end result.

America will find its Napoleon if it fights many more significant wars in close succession.

-----:---:--:-.

It is just as well there is a convention against multiple colons in a sentence. In most workaday writing, however good, the colon is just a splice, although a pregnant one.

But in creative writing, a really strong writer with a delicate hand can create a galloping sentence that joins clause after clause with propulsive colons. This can be thrillingly effective. Wilde has a few of these in De Profundis and they have the effect of the best cinematic montages that compress a development of years of into a minute of breath-snatching sequence:

It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man from either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from you into the hands of loathsome companions: from him to a gang of blackmailers: copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager of a theater where my work is being performed: every construction but the right one is put upon it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumors that I have had to pay a huge sum of money for having written an infamous letter to you: this forms the basis of your father's worst attack: I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is: it is denounced by your father's counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge. The Crown takes it up: the Judge sums it up with a little learning and much morality: I go to prison for it at last.

more inertia

One objection is that the mind may fly from place to place in an instant - that thought is unbounded by inertia, indeed physicality. But to think of Rome, and then Beijing (or both at once), is not to travel in place or (usually) even in thought.

inertia

The preservation of momentum is consistently observable not only in obviously physical phenomena, but in mental, social and otherwise abstract human phenomena as well. So much so that to say so is barely even an insight. But what if this omnipresence of inertia is the signature of the covert physicality of all abstractions?

now what

Some people want to eat not because they are hungry, or for the taste of it, or the social aspects, but simply because they are bored. Some people want conflict because they are bored. Some think from boredom. Some work from boredom. Some save lives from boredom.

S

An earthworm dies on driveway concrete and leaves a mark - an iron stain that will not go.

mosaic

A moderate must have programs and a narrative, or else lose all advantage to the flanks.

tent

Truth, like oxygen, must be mixed or regulated.

aie

It's an beautiful, unnerving thought: that black holes glow with the widowed halves of nascent particle-antiparticle pairs, one half born(e) into the fateful horizon. That they dimly ululate with particular mourning.

Sally's Beauty Supply

Makers of electric hair clippers provide a particularly clear - almost pristine - exhibit of how to handle and mishandle race in a commercial context. Clippers may be generalist models that will cut any kind of hair reasonably well, or specialist models that will cut some kinds of hair especially well. So for the specialized models, there is the question of how to convey that this model is great for this hair type. And one way to do that is to associate the hair-type with a race for which the type is common. I say all this because I went to a beauty supply store to buy a pair (pair? Oh language, how I love thee) of hair clippers. And the shelves gave these examples:

• Total code: it turns out the "Five Star" line of Wahl clippers is the brand for thick, dense hair and thick beards prone to ingrown hairs. This isn't a bad approach since it doesn't imply that the line is solely for one hair type or one race. But it takes a while to catch on to. (And the other Wahl lines have completely different names - there isn't a Six Star or Four Star line, etc.)
• Total race: Oster has both an "Afro-American" line and an "ethnic" line. This approach is offensive in part because it is simply inaccurate. It's skittish and inaccurate enough that "black" would have been better by a tad. But only a tad: the trouble here is that hair type is being conflated with (rather than simply associated with) race. The only virtue of this approach is that it suggests what the better alternative would be.
• Total substance: Andis gives their clippers names, but prominent on the packages are what the clippers do: "Balding trimmer for thick, curly beards"; "All-day use clipper for any human hair"; "cut-down t-clipper for barber or veterinary use". This is clear, and it is focused on function: what do clippers deal with - various manipulations of hair of various types.

Good job, Andis. Second place to Wahl, since the total code approach does suggest that the specialized buyer (barbers, mostly) may know how a tool may be adapted to uses not anticipated by its maker. And Oster simply fails.

All in all, a really fine example of how especially accuracy, sometimes avoidance, but not obscurity, are the havens in which true respect of others is found.

youth; branding

The Starbucks near my office opens at 5:30, and when I don't carry my coffee from home, I stop in. It's really shelving and prep time - not many customers - and the kids who work there are punchy, and don't stop horsing around just because an early customer happens by.

This morning, much laughter - one kid is stocking the pastry case, and another is aiming coffee beans at her head. One at a time, about ten feet away, nice high arcs and pretty good aim. The third kid is impressed. Laughter all around.

Mock anger: "You're throwing beans at me!"
Sly answer: "No I'm not!"
Mock fury: "You are throwing beans at me!"
Arch reply: "It's Starbucks."

Happiness all around.

next

The world treats a man with a plan as not simply useful, but hot.

lesson

For a while my parents would make cinnamon toast in the oven on Sunday mornings, not for us, but for their Sunday school class. We'd have oatmeal, usually, and certainly nothing with sugar. Why can't we have cinnamon toast, we'd say. And they: because you're not in our class.

Now, I unpack that and see things about my parents revealed, and obscured. Truths about life exampled and mistaken. Lessons about language and rhetoric and politics, both helpful and not.

We are quickly afloat, even in so simple an anecdote. Neither meaningless nor telling, fully. The lesson, for the reflective thinker, is humility about ends and wonder at the abundance of ways and means.

faux-Emily

My thigh is as part-soul to me,
My soul is as my thigh.
What carries me no man can see,
But habit calls it I.

A socketed and stony stress,
Half-motive and half-eye;
The piston and the pivot press,
And being passes by.

next

People desire a plan - not only for themselves, but in others. So much so that the content and purpose of the plan must be fairly repellent for the effect to be lost.

terrain

Optimism is a rational response to unknown conditions, but not to unresolved ends or uncertain desirability.

Qohelet

Time is hungry.

Oh, to be a father.

tannic

There is a public mood. Always has and will be. And this is a sort of civic god.

swell

A choir here:
For them these ranks
And above them pipes of brass and tin.

To sound and show what
Builds a chapel into more,
In the heart of the translated preacher.

Who sees in his little place and littler flock
Not heaven but earth:
Cathedrals.

His service hitched
To the higher unseen.
And to the joy of chiseled grandeur.

Such words:
Not only hope and charity
But nave and sacristy,
Font and crypt,
Robe and stole,
Book and hymn,
Father.

a self-centered one

Sure I have some talents. I'm a really fine firefighter. I can change minds and carry a room of peers, or at least smother a bad idea, more often than most. One-on-one, I can remind friends of their souls. And I can execute a sharp, clean 90º turn.

But I'm neither an executive nor a neat-and-tidy lieutenant. In an organization I have to be the exception to thrive, even though I don't lean into it or take advantage of it. I am inescapably other.

shades

Well, it is desirable to be tall and strong. But that is not to say that it is to be desired.

part two

A simpler way of getting at it is this: just a few drops of certainty, like dye, would turn the clear liquid of human thought opaque. It is hard to imagine anyone thinking in heaven.

part one

I've no basis for thinking life and the universe to be meaningless. And my feelings and instincts run contrary: life and the world feel meaningful.

But I do sometimes wonder whether the breathing space for precisely this feeling of meaningfulness is a result of actual meaninglessness. I wonder this because the range of possible and felt meanings is so very broad and fluid, both within myself and - much more - among people generally.

That is, if the world or life or both had a particular meaning, one supposes that meaning would constrict the range of felt meanings - since they would conflict. The image I have in mind is that of a grain of salt dropped into a super-saturated liquid, that instantly crystallizes - solidifies: even a little bit of real meaning would seize the free-wheeling feelings of meaning.

Maybe - maybe not. People can evade truths will little difficulty, after all.

The religious idea that a true God must hold back to allow us freedom is basically sound and capable of a great deal of sophistication in practice and consideration. And that's why the problem of evil doesn't do fatal damage to religion: the problem is exactly that - a problem, a serious one - but it isn't a contradiction or absurdity.

we

The usage of we falls anywhere along two dimensions. The first is the I/you dimension: there is the I-ish we, the you-ish we, and at the midpoint, a neutral equipoise between first and second person. The second dimension is inclusion/exclusion, again with a neutral midpoint.

CCC

We live in a world of cross-currents and half-rights. If one wishes to do a wider good - something beyond doing good in one's surroundings and letting the results flow organically - I say, if one wishes to do a wider good, setting up a durable stone shelter by a cleared path is a fine place to start.

That's what I like about the Bluebook and the Bankruptcy Code and the UCC, anyhow.

desired

To have and care for the friends I love. To seek no false friend. To reject no relative. To read what I want, but to want widely rather than simply tickling my favorite spots.

To work, and mean it. To build from experience to strength. To know the vanity of the plowing but to plow anyway, in straight lines well cut, to see the seasons pass.

make

I am a default pragmatist. I would rather have tablets from on high. I am wired to be a conservative, a textualist, a preserver and implementer of past decisions. But sound and approved past decisions are nowhere to be found. I steer my own ship, not because I feel myself a captain but because I feel like a lieutenant, woken from a long sleep to find that no more senior officer is aboard.

And in that state, what works is what's best. Not because function is truth, but because function is the best test of small truths. And functional elements of a working sequence suggest incrementally larger truths.

paralysis

Paralysis: Life is beautiful, and will remain so. All that is required is a firm sense of perspective. Zoom out and the dirt becomes invisible.

not stand again

Another reason I am not political is that I am in no hurry.

not stand

One reason I am not political is that I lost my feel for glory, too, when I lost my faith.

zip code

As a group gets larger, it is less and less thinking collectively, and more and more having moods, to the extent it is self-directing at all. A group of more than, say, a thousand, is safely characterized as moody but not thinking unless it is directed.

But this is not a put-down of crowds. If anything, it is a sort of deification. A person alive in a crowded world finds himself in the hands of the crowd, whether the crowd or the person would have it so or not. They - and their moods - are simply there. And there is a sort of dance of acceptance and resistance that follows, on the part of both. A mutual interference as a better alternative to self-loss, or bloodshed.

stop

One argument - good so far as it goes, which isn't the whole distance - in favor of restricting philosophy to the aristocracy is this: that just as a judges who are interested in the outcome of a case must recuse themselves, so to should strivers, ones who have yet to succeed but want to, recuse themselves from projects of reflection that depend on a kind of serenity. Which most philosophy does. The alternative is to have serenity without means, and that is a sort of monkish life, preferably in the service of a wealthy institutional church (or other system of support).

terror

One of the dangerous truths: fear is effective, almost magically so. It conjures. It romances the inner demons of actors, who glimpse, as if lit by sheet lightning, the lines laying at their feet that run to our hearts, waiting to make puppets of all, or nearly all. But these threads, strong enough to tangle a nation, are, sweet to tell, only threads. The greater ropes and chains are of love, are seen in the say, and make puppets of none. This is one reason why all life is a middle march, a muddling through, a making of garden plots while the thicker bramble grows.

climb

But of course I do believe in manners. Not just those of courtesy, but those of custom, of form and of design. Staves for music; trellises for vines: manners for men.

hi

It is not precisely youth that we are after when we try to stay "young" - it is a forward flow, a happy spilling into the next present.

rope

We all hinder our friends by our friendship, with a hindrance that is no wrong.

presently

Memory is the umbrella of the soul.

cover

To believe in destiny is to believe in the importance of clouds.

right

Reason is that which makes certain actions functional (the function may be very subtle, as with some forms of play). Where the action is not real, it may be imagined, and if well imagined, the reason remains as abstract reasoning. The best means of understanding and judging abstract reasoning is to reconstitute the imagined action of which the reasoning is an aspect and in which the reasoning has its being. Where the reason is an aspect of and has its being within - that is, animates - many possible actions, the reason may be an idea, even a significant one. Some fine novels are an exhibition of the many-bodied (that is, many-actioned) character of one, or a few, soul-like ideas.

a false one

Reason, strictly speaking, is passive. Action, though, may be shaped by reason.

Wrong.

weave

Love, respect and the achievements of friends - great ropes that pull us into society.

the sea

The mind has its own ways apart from reason. Quiet from thought, the mind hears the crashing of waves as significant, the direction from which a bird calls as significant, the withered hand of a passer by as significant, the beeping of a reversing truck as insignificant.

pear

A long country walk alone; a hot summer day. I steal a pear, too green, from a bough by the road; my pull shook the tree. Another pear falls to the hot grass with a squat thud - a ripe sound - and I keep walking, with false intensity, and eat.

vacation

A pleasing blank.

enlightenment

It is too simple to be true, but it gets at something: reason can be conceived as an elaboration of, as an evolved descendant of, animal aggression. One might even say that a rational form of government is violent on a different plane. I do not say "is merely violent on a different plane": dimension and development of the violence matter plenty if, for example, the difference is a reduction in bloodshed.

man in

There's a minute or two, some eveings, during which the sky has the same luminous intensity and saturation of hue as the lamps of the traffic light. One looks up from the cross walk and is greeting by a beautiful full green moon.

gestation

In the day since seeing it, Un Prophète has matured in my mind from one of the finest movies I've seen (not least for the sustained, perspectival morality necessary to and motivating its formal amorality). As I say, it has matured in my mind over the last day from one of the best movies I've seen into one of the best interior experiences I've had. The pregnant bleakness of this movie reminds me of only one other cinematic creation I know: those stony, white-painted, hard-staring scenes from Fanny and Alexander set in the Bishop's house.

There are other correspondences between those Bishop's house scenes and the French prison scenes: the cinematic treatment of white, bright sunlight as a symbol for a certain kind of insistent evil - the peculiar evil latent in bleach or lime.

Dichogamy

It is interesting - not all that productive, though - to think of much human work as peculiarly generated by the interaction of young adults and elders, thought of as two genders, understood more in contrast than in isolation.

genesis

Other
Connection
Item
Transaction

comfort my people

It comes as a momentary shock - but then as a realization of the obvious - to understand that a powerful factor in the development of the viewpoints of most people is the desire for comfort.

elves

The human mind: so cause-happy. I glance under my desk this morning and see a few strewn dots of paper, fallen from my three-hole punch. Somehow the patten was celebratory, like confetti, and one hears the mental question, half-embarassed at itself: "was there a tiny party down there last night?"

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly - mind gotta find causes.

tipple

To have a few vices feels (is?) invigorating. It flatters one's (confirms one's?) freedom.

But to be had by a vice is to know the truth of Christ's comparison: sin is a harder master than virtue.

A personal discipline, though, does all that vice does - both in vigor and in harshness - and though it usually yields nothing, it may yield much.

go on

One of the low down, awful things about me is that I would often rather fill in a spreadsheet with numbers -

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (even now I want to keep going)...

- I would often rather do that than think about something serious. And that's low down.

go

The feeling of mental inertia - the difficulty in starting a task and the ease of continuing it once begun - is so similar to the phenomenon of physical inertia, that one wonders whether, somehow, deep in the brain, mental inertia simply is physical inertia.

One wonders this even though mental inertia is easy to account for from thought based causes: clearing distractions, gathering facts, ordering work, segmenting concepts. All of that beginning-work is harder than execution, even when execution is drudgery.

dray

Facts, stubborn factual truth, rule the necessary barnyards of life - law firms, pharmacies, warehouses, the land. The temples, though, belong to ministers of feeling reaching for truths of force: churches, prisons, courtrooms, the sea.

vow

Strictly speaking, I don't think it is possible to betray or honor an individual. One betrays a common understanding (usually common to more than the subject and object). The individual may be harmed or upheld, but it is something held in common (though not necessarily by the betraying subject) that is betrayed or honored.

Put short: Fidelity and infidelity are necessarily public acts.

neckbone

Why think epigrammatically? The epigram reaches the joint of reason to moral sentiment, which is its motive or master. The epigram pleases and is understood by moral sentiment, which delights in being noticed and shaped. And by focusing on the rational joint, the epigram obtains leverage, and the feeling, to the listener, of resulting movement is a revelation of self that delights, even when the matter of the epigram is unhappy.

chirp

Sir, you are poor because you have too little to sell.

sophistication

Lacenaire: I'd spill torrents of blood to give you rivers of diamonds.

Garance: I'd settle for less.

doctorow

How did I get this far into my reading (and adult) life without knowing the word mons?

godzilla

The wretchedness of individual man is the certainty of death and the lack of much to give or subsist upon.

The wretchedness of social man is that, to avoid bloodshed, we must tend to, placate and occasionally give way to that rather nasty agglomeration: a majority.

The glory of individual man is a peaceful path to a simple end, especially when that course was sweet to those nearby who knew it.

The glory of social man is the commerce of ideas and goods amongst the cities.

redden

Ordinarily, in court, the truth will out.

this is what I try to give

One strand of maturation is to appreciate better the role of gift-wrapping paper.

united church

A simple belief in God makes easy that necessary and beautiful conviction of the infinite worth of each individual person, and of the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind. Convictions that are very hard to sustain otherwise. And some forms of religion - often but not always perceived as liberal - are felt, motivated and sustained by exactly this - the facilitation of brotherly love.

hive

To pass above on elevated tracks and see a fenced lot stacked high with yellow-painted taxi cab fenders, doors, hoods - put on me an impression of awe and gave a reflection of dread.

comforting the able

A related point: the more aware a friend is - the more aware of self and others and future prospects - the harder it is to offer comfort beyond sincere love and thoughtful understanding. Most forms of comfort are gentle bamboozlements, but for the alert and able, only love and understanding - and small acts of usefulness - are a balm.

This is fulfilling both for the loving and the loved.

Of course, comforting one who is just shy of aware is the same, with the beautiful addition of explanation. Think of the wonderful relief of a correct diagnosis from a sympathetic doctor or friend.

mitigation cloaked

But mitigations do not inspire - what people want are solutions. So mitigations are often cloaked as solutions. Religions, marriages, politics - innumerable of the good mitigations of each kind have been sold as solutions, adopted as solutions, and done good because they are not solutions - only mitigations.

more unnatural

Modernity is not the problem - the problem is within humanity, is an aspect of human kind, is part of human nature. But real solutions to humanity's core problems are worse than what they (dis)solve. Mitigation is the calling. To tame, entrance, enfeeble, hem, complicate, even harness what is natural but wrong within us each, and about us all.

unnatural

Many things are natural but bad. It is natural but bad to resent one's betters simply for the results of their talents, good fortune or effort. It is natural but bad to seek out those who may be oppressed and oppress them. It is natural, but impolite, to spit on the sidewalk. It is natural, but evil, to kill one's brother in raging jealousy.

That is why the argument that something is natural - or unnatural - carries little weight with me unless it is part of a larger and more sensitive argument. For example, that it is unnatural for old people's knees to flex to the point of fully kneeling is a perfectly sound argument for kneeling benches at the parish church.

permanently tired

When I am very tired I am irritable and dull. Some people are generally irritable and dull. Perhaps some such people are, at bottom, tired all the time, as a basic trait or burden?

Perhaps - but they would have to be more tired than can be addressed by adaptation.

starting march

The end of religion for me was the realization that no truth could sustain the introduction I wanted to give it: "Come we now to the universal core."

But nothing can follow that.

universal

We all take pleasure in the realization that an enemy is stupid or weak. This is not from the increased prospect of prevailing, for we feel it even in learning that a past enemy had been stupid or weak.

But then again perhaps it is the feeling of an increased prospect of prevailing, even though the occurance is past, never to recur: for so much of what we feel is the sensation of an inward play, and in that uncoiling of mental scenario, what's past is here, even as what might be, or what's hoped for, is here.

But what is here, often enough, is merely and flatly here. Daily bread. Quotidian. The alternatives, the glorious present, comes in three forms: the synchronicity of mental scenario and occurrence, which is a realization, or an absence of scenario that leaves us bare within occurrence, which is enrapture, or the sudden change of situation, which is transport.

sharp ascender, bowled decender, reaching tail

-

August

-

What a beautiful word August is, if said at a moderate speed, written with a good hand, or printed from a friendly roman font.

aha

How did I miss it all these years:

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

more eames

Form follows function, but the function of form may be very subtle. In government the manner of conducting deliberations and the like is as important as the policies that emerge. The accouterments - the globe and sword, book and map, raiment and gesture - within a portrait of state may be integral.

twain

The great advantage of shacking up is that it makes not being single easier to imagine: it's an accelleration ramp. This disadvantage is that it obscures the mystery of being two, which is there whether or not wanted, and whether kept sacred or profaned.

comments

Anonymity eases vice, and strips virtue of its rewards.

bald egal

The (relatively) poor are hard to befriend because of their troubles. And so with all those who are encamped with woe: only another wretch may enter in without the smell of charity or superiority.

Where status builds a wall that conceals the charitable or woeful offense, however, friendships are again easy.

glad hand

There is a temptation: to utilize another's uninvited misunderstanding to obtain a result that would not have been agreed if understood. But this is unsafe and usually wrong. The exceptions are generally short term misunderstandings, borne of another's emotional or other objective limitations, that stand athwart agreement and the other's urgent interests.

very well, thank you

The better part of courtesy and social grace is to signal that one is profitable to be near - a source of pleasure and strength, and no burden.

pacific

My potential I must lose, grain by grain.

desire

I would not be without my work, my pleasures, or my friends. Let me have but the means to hold them.

design

The world is not as we would have it and we are not as we yearn to be. This is the genesis of design, which becomes the tense opposite of death, victorious only in the struggle, able finally to achieve only its noble defeat.

On some days this is the happy and industrious sense of doom that lights my way.

or DC

New York, in residential experience, is simply a string of neighborhoods, and feels smaller than Atlanta, or even Charlotte. The experience of living in New York (other than working, and assuming one isn't in a car) is not more akin to living in Asheville, North Carolina, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, than it is to living in Los Angeles.

Do

I'd be happier if I read less, thought less. But happiness is not my goal.

Neptune

Nihilism finds fertile ground in any abstraction: of value from things (money); of people from place (prisons); of knowledge from purpose. And abstractions that cannot find their justification elsewhere find their excuse in nihilism.

siren

Pleasure is a serious, deep and wide topic, with as many varieties and implications as political subjects ever manage.

caffine

Exaggeration is vulgarity.
Vulgarity is exaggeration.

Or very nearly so.

Exaggeration is a means of thought, argumentation and expression, and as such it is useful although overused because it is easier than the alternatives. It is sometimes also an aesthetic end in itself, and as such can be beautiful unless it is becomes pornographic.

Exaggeration in all its varieties is at its best when it is a means of simplification, and at its worst when it is lost to means and ends and exists merely as an unconscious personal characteristic or habitual stimulant.

Alexis

Democracies need popular experience with working in assemblies: clubs, chambers of commerce, congregations and so on.

auto

I have analytic taste but synthetic thought. That suggests an urban preference and plenty else.

switch

Most of the crass and ugly things we (correctly) accuse money of being could, were we cruel, be said of family or thought. One of money's intellectual uses is that it takes its lashes patiently silently and stays strong, a whipping boy, while we spare the more delicate and favored child, who will be lost to us if we strike him.

first love

Halt! Who goes there?
A friend.
What's the password?
I don't know.
You may pass.

hippocratic

For lawyers, a variant: first, do your client no harm.

escalade

Some practical tools masquerade as jewlery. Sometimes for vanity, sometimes for sales, but perhaps sometimes out of decency?

And so with all forms of carriage. A pine box needs something with which to cover itself if it is to really to honor its contents.

furrow

This is work
That must be done
So do it.

I will,
I said I would,
I like to work
And I need the money.

Or not the money but to be
Left to work this field I need.

For these tools are what are mine
And these blisters tell me
I am a man.

But let it be this field:
Not for its good soil,
Not for my fellow hands
But because of its place.

Well placed, for from it we can
Hear that love, that carillon,
Whose bells reach no park and no shore,
None at leisure but only
Nearer fields, that are plowed
To the faded tang of long seconds
That bear foundry air,
Heavy from ore.

In this field,
When the good wind carries,
The hands can hear
The peals that call
As if to reverence him,
To whom,
I toil.

going home

I said that there is a kind of exhaustion and a kind of sadness that are alike. But really there are more than one kind of each - exhaustion and sadness - that are alike. And many of these are found in loving, or in being loved, or in both. And what kinds of love? Probably many, but at least in familial love.

bakbakk bakbakk bakbakk

The word locomotive manages to be both onomatopoetic and classically rooted, both awkward and elegant.

I'll bet there were Ceasers who were less Latinate.

middlemarch

There is something so perfectly middle aged about spying.

well

"Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly" ... well, here comes a beautiful lie.

going

There is a kind of exhaustion and a kind of sadness that are alike.

congregation

The religious life is a preparation for the democratic life. In both there is the potential for a sublimation of the popular will. In the reasonable living of either there is tension, and it is in the tuning rather than the undoing of this tension that hope lies.

The idea that life is about productive tension is the serious stake-claim of democratic or religious thinking. The observation that democracy and religion are great taming forces is the underlying justification for either.

Less bloodshed and plenty to think about is not a bad bargain.

picturesque

There is that strange temptation, for the observer, of beautiful human situations that are awful for those who put on the show. The doomed romance, say. Or the still-innocent but randy teen, trying to scramble onto the pedestal of his beloved and surprised to find not marble and alabaster, but just another person. The new recruit to a political cause that promises tomorrow. A world's fair.

taurus

For my part, I am not a naturalist. Mysticism under oppression is the natural state of man, but not the desired state.

more tourist

Put differently, ignorance is sometimes picturesque, and thus temptingly attractive to those with an observational bent towards others.

tourist at home

Ignorance is fixable and stupidity is not, they say. But it is not so simple: ignorance is fixable only within the bounds of available time for teaching and stupidity may be acculturated into something better.

And again, it is not so simple, because the motivation of the less ignorant or less stupid may be complicated by the sense that ignorance is companionable, somehow precious, while stupidity is not, and although inborn, is to be blamed on the individual as the taking of series of bad choices.

There is a great danger of treating those around us not as our neighbors but as our setting.

burble

This blog, at its best, is like having a backyard creek, somewhere between like a model train, and at worst like a drink too many: in short, a good pleasure, or a grown man's childishness, or an indiscretion.

now

The fight is with myself - or with ennui, if it and I be not in identity.

65 mph

What do I have in common with a stone? A tree? A finch? A newborn human baby? My self last year? These landmarks help structure thinking about the bits and pieces of being human - a little.

Ham

That something -- and particularly that an idea -- is flawed, does not make it bad. Even that something is wrong does not necessarily make it bad.

And a few things that are right are bad. Some truths are wicked, except in the abstract.

And that is my point: that there is such a thing as a truth whose revelation is damaging in every plausible context; and there are many flawed things (and even some wrong things) that are usually helpful.

cnbc

People will watch money, listen for it, tell time by it, as if it were a church bell. People would read Plotinus if his writings were from the Oracle of Omaha.

People, at their most money-mesmerized, are an awful temptation. They seem, to the wrong mind, to cry out to be defrauded, pillaged, bamboozled, swindled, taken for a ride, given a bill of sale...

wd-40

A cut brass key is artifact of a relay of trust and craft and ownership, it is a symbol in its literalness, in its assertive pastness and promised readiness. It is that present link, depending from a chain that leads back - and forward.

communion

Let every one know a craft. You are surrounded by made things, and for the image of their making to quaver, latent in their possession, is to rework into them something beyond craft, to pass into the orchard of civilized physicality and to know that we climb through and pluck from others' trees, that by this we are of one, and by this come to know we are so.

sickle

The glory of Russia is its sadness.

no land

A society that cared for those it had finished punishing I might still think good, however greivous its punishments.

future

For the wise not acts or things but the varieties of becoming are prescribed or proscribed.

Otis

As the depths are holy and as a wound is holy, so a prison is twice holy.

copia

One of the great words: quiver.

blurt

Time pressure improves my work. Is this an effect of being conversational, or somehow the cause?

medieval glass

Professional, descriptive writing of high quality is of three basic types at the sentence level.

The first type is geometric, for which the sense of the clauses is focused and inward facing, and the larger meanings are reticulated.

The second type is flowing and carries its sense by connection and the lapidary anticipation and recapitulation of meanings that will, and now has, and next had, their moments.

The third type is perpendicular, and is a rigid combination of the geometric and the flowing: each clause is focused on itself; each clause is regularized to fit; and each part flows in formation like a parading soldier.

All three types are, in successful experience, combinations.

For the geometric, the sustained interest of the intelligent reader suppliers the flow, and by so doing enlivens the material and enables the writer's restraint in connections and devotion of superstructure to greater ends than the mere supply of coherence.

For the flowing, the particular attention of the intelligent reader catches the lapidary meanings, and by so doing gives purpose to the movement and frees the writer from the need to stop for each item.

For the perpendicular, the writing is itself sustained and particular, and the reader is rapidly freed to consider the completeness of, or alternatives and additions to, the order and elements of the writing. Or the reader is simply freed to pass quickly through. Or the writer has stopped short of subtler analysis.

For the weak or hurried writer, the perpendicular is the most accessible of the excellent forms. And for the weak or hurried reader, it is the same: the perpendicular is the most accessible.

For the informed but not brilliant reader, the sensation of flowing writing is the most like stepping momentarily into having a superior mind (if the writer had one).

For the intelligent but underinformed reader, the reticulated nuggets of the geometric are the most easily apprehended and utilized, a ready borrowing of the writer's specialized experience.

$

Saying someone "does it for the money" is usually truncated thought. Because money is (except to a few oddballs) wholly instrumental. Someone who "does it for the money" is usually really doing it "to provide for old age" or to "pay for my child's tuition" or to "buy cocaine" or what-not. Money should be seen as transparent, and when properly seen, what had appeared to be mere money-grubbing turns out usually to either be better or worse than that. Better: to provide for the needs of my family and my old age. Worse: to have luxuries. Better: to provide for a new enterprise. Worse: to rate higher than others.

pleasure

Failure is an under appreciated option, and pushing harder lives up to its cultural pedestal. But half-measures are indefensible except as a kind of ruse.

Strauss

Some writers are more impressive for their effect on other writers than in their own writing. They are kin to those whose salons are more glittering than their own conversation. Usually this sort of writer is, to me, caffinating, or somewhat intoxicating, but not more. And perhaps that is enough.

Sometimes you have a point that seems fatal to the opposition, in your mind. And then you plunge it in, during a meeting, and feel the squeaking spring inside the blade's handle - and realize it was a trick dagger with a retractable rubber blade... Curses!

thrill

I have that same feeling of pleasure, a little candylike pop, when I see a well-cast sentence or a telling verb, as I feel when I see a beautiful face or catch a cool breeze on a hot day.

pigeon

Cities over time enable justice.

dry

I pass the car wash here on 31st St. Late out, and the yellow cabs and black cars line up to get clean. I pass, window down, past the guys toweling the cars dry and say. I am you and not you. I am like you and unlike you. I am your superior and inferior; I am better and worse. But I am me and not you, here and not there, my own and not yours.

more grip

I mainly associate liberals with movements and conservatives with institutions, but of course this is just a matter of default cognates.

Liberal institutions (unions, legal aid societies) are as prone to ossification, bloat, waste and menacing uselessness as conservative institutions (chambers of commerce, the farm lobby).

Conservative movements (nativism, purification movements) are as prone to populism, classism, duplicity, brake failure and to throwing the baby out with the bathwater as are liberal movements (humanitarian efforts, rights expansion).

The core insight is that none of these works well, but that the alternative (no movements and no institutions; or else only liberal or conservative instances of one or both) would be even worse.

grip

One conservative impulse, which I share, is the sense that nothing is indestructible, many things are fragile, and that much of what holds civil life together is unknown, possibly unknowable. In short, that most reforms are like digging a trench in the middle of a Manhattan street: who really knows what old and necessary steam fitting is down there that had slipped off the planning maps?

The analogy holds for its implication of paralysis, too: we cannot dig recklessly, but often we must dig. To work at civil life is the surest way to illuminate it, even though the trenchwork simultaneously threatens what is in place.

I accept as true that civil life is ever put at risk by both change and sameness, and by about equal measure. The moderate is the muddler; the wisdom we need is that of the muddler; civilizations that succeed muddle through. I hate revolutions and oppression alike, but accept that both are - wretched truth! - occasionally the least evil option.

overheard

A: "That's a lot of water out there."

B: "Yeah, and that's just the top of it!"

retracing eames

Ethics is design: the arrangement of human behavior to address human problems. Ethics is design: an ethical life has the rapture and pinch of life in a great work of architecture, with furnishings and gardens laid out with care.

ceruse

To be seen impartially is to be seen impersonally. To show one's self impartially is grand but bloodless. The most dramatic effect is to show impartial reason atop lively cause; a pale and bloodless face and an elaborately worked body, vital with tensed ability. Thus Elizabeth I; thus the Declaration of Independence.

ride

My eye for detail is weak; that is professional vice.

shorthand

My political views are not unusual. Structurally, I stand for a relatively small and vigorous republic within a democracy. Socially, I stand for an ever-expanding aristocracy within a democracy.

I move in the meritocratic direction, yes, but from a popular foundation - or, better, entirely within a popular whole. I am a small-r republican last and I am a small-r democrat first. The democracy is the means to an ennobling end.

sandbox

That a thought is difficult is no defect. Only when the thought is more difficult than another at least as good is there a defect.

And likewise with a system of thought: that a system is not initially or eventually or internally clear is no argument against it, but only against using in a context that demands ease.

The difficulty of an idea, or the the obscurity of a system, may be the grit that gives the idea traction, or the compaction that gives an idea utility.

tax free

Promiscuity is the poor man's yacht.

Washington

The maintenance by the United States of civilian control, to a high degree, over an apolitical but mammoth military is a most fragile, unlikely, and valuable achievement.

One reason it has been preserved is that it is one of those rare practical things that can actually be addressed by the management of set-piece media kerfuffles and the theater of wise old men. "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."

pug

After all, why is it that I don't fight everybody? Or hardly anybody, and hardly ever, and then meekly? Since I fight myself like a gamecock every day.

pardon my dust

The epitaph engraved on the tombstone of humankind will be "They had language."

more future

The future is a functional litmus test for what is mind rather than merely neural, and for what is affection of the spirit rather than merely animal emotions.

Exactly the part of you that can reason about the future is your mind. The remainder of your neural function is not.

Exactly that in you that bears on the future is your spirit.

These are not definitions, much less explanations, of mind or spirit, but rather only tests for detecting what is or is not mind or spirit.

But conclusions and assumptions do flow from taking the test to be valid. And I espouse every such conclusion or assumption I have been able to think of. For example, that the mind is part of the spirit. Or that, if it were shown that storing nuts for the winter is not instinctive but a matter of planning, then squirrels have minds.

wait don't cross

Delaying a conflict is often a useful, even necessary tactic, yet delay carries a negative connotation. That should not be: first, because delay stands or falls on the merits of its application; second, because there are other words like procrastinating that are more specific and ready to be saddled with a presumption of fault. The American Senate managed to put off the Civil War for decades with jawboning, callous disregard for the enslaved, and weird political compromises. And, yet, had the Civil War been fought much earlier than it was, the free states, as such, probably would have lacked the political coherence, European diplomatic and commercial heft - and warmaking capacity - to win.

Put short: Retreat is an essential tactic, but stalling is usually cheaper and better than retreat when the reasons for a would-be retreat are already known.

map quest

If a country and its capital looks like this:

P P
P.P
P P

And you split it up like this:

P Z
Z.P
P Z

Then there is going to be trouble, and, folks will be apt to blame that trouble on the inhabitants rather than the divvying unless they have the map continually before them.

10 kilosamars

Generosity must be measured twice: by its distance from doing nothing, and again by its distance from what is needed.

ill wind

The fate of Father Coughlin's influence is a comfort.

hope

The future is that peculiarly human tense.

U.S.A.

It's an old debate: between attaining nobler ends by harnessing human imperfections or elevating human nature. My view is conventionally American, I suppose: siding with Adams and against Jefferson, but eager to co-opt the elevating rhetoric of the latter augments to assist the functional harnessing, and understanding that too frank a public espousal of the former interferes with its progress.

what is truth

On the whole, how people behave is more important than what people believe.

disaster

From a human standpoint, I suppose the properly predominant unit of measure for most crises is net annual migration per capita.

spectre

Student loans are nondischargable in bankruptcy except under the most extraordinary and miserable circumstances. This inescapable debt magnifies risks and anxiety, and constrains. It also engenders sympathy - the thought that not greed but fear drives much that passes for avarice, slavish work, monetary desperation and, yes, probably some of what passes for entrepreneurial spirit and wealth creation, too.

etaoin shrdlu

Some people want to fly an airplane, just once. I want to operate a Linotype machine, just once.

primer

It isn't quite right to say that money corrupts.

Corruption is spoilation. Moisture corrupts iron. Mold corrupts bread. Maggots corrupts flesh.

Money, by contrast, sterilizes. Money neutralizes. Money flattens. Money numbs. Money, above all, connects. (It is almost possible to say that money is pure, abstracted connection in metered, persistent form.)

It is then, after the monetary connection, that something corruptive floods onto the sterilized, neutralized, flattened, numbed object, and it corrupts. Money only prepared the way.

That's why I try to say, not that money corrupts, but that a payment corrupts. Because it emphasizes the hand that conveys the money, because it implies the purpose behind the monetary priming of an object, that, very likely, is about to be shellacked.



(Yes, I know I am pushing analogies too hard. But remember, these posts are partly me horsing around.)

will

I was just saying that conjunctions of law and force work on the will. Imagine being in a good, orderly community and wanting to break into a locked apartment, but an honest beat cop is walking by. The cop isn't doing anything to you, but the combination of law and his presence will work on your will.

Of course, the law doesn't have to be good for the point to hold. Imagine being black in a segregated southern town during the time of Jim Crow laws, and you want to walk into a whites-only restaurant. That honest-but-enforcing-an-evil-law beat cop is going to work the same way on your will. That you might gather courage and step in anyway is a clear indication of just this, and that the tactic of nonviolence might occur to you just then is still further indication of the basic relationship.

What is essential is not the goodness of the law, but the law and force be tightly conjoined: each component must be clear (the law in meaning, the cop in ability) and the conjunction must be tight (no bribes, no unenforced laws). Otherwise, we are not dealing with our will, but only our reason, on the one hand, and our animal fear, on the other.

butter

You will misunderstand laws if you think they restrain action. Laws work upon reason. Only physical force - handcuffs, moats, gravity - restrains action. (The conjunction of law and force, in turn, works upon the will.)

Now, many actions in our world are quite abstract, for example a periodic bond payment. In this realm of abstract action, the law, itself abstract, appears to operates quite directly and to have a force unto itself. And that is a doubly useful appearance: it butresses compliance and simplifies the conditions for action. But the compulsion is still a matter of the prospect physical force and not the law itself: a server room can be stormed, a transmission can be scrambled, a copper wire may be cut, and - since this is hardly a modern issue - a mind may be stopped by a blow to the body.

license

An effective lawmaker cleaves solid constraint as a cutter cleaves a raw diamond: not to destroy it, but to raise a mineral lump to optical might, reliability and subtlety. Law is not force but of force: the result of an operation of reason upon force to plane and facet it. The surface revealed is law, and its work is to refract and focus human reason. There is the possibility of brilliance.

humus

What is important is not that I be free but that I feel free and am able to move about. The social requirement and political commitment of an American is a slant towards freedom, which could only ever be relative. But in absolute terms we are constantly faced with and supported by force, and this is as important as the availability of paths for movement and some degree of open, pathless choice.

In this we are like earthworms. We thrive neither in solid rock nor in open air. What we want is loamy, fertile soil, shot through with variation - pockets of air, some roots and gravel, and moderate variation in moisture. It is in the intercomposition of freedom and force that we live and work and have our being.

yes

The letterform serves the word, the word the phrase, and the phrase the meaning. Yet even the letter's form has its dignity and its own life. So too, the lawyer, a servant, has his own professional dignity and vitality, his inns and bars.

employment

To lack money and time, and to want either - or especially both - is to become a servant. And that is neither good nor bad.

welcome and forgive

There is a knack for accepting thanks elegantly and humbly. A otherwise good person easily muffs it.

And there is a similar knack for accepting sincere apologies.

how

Craft and motion. Declaming for ideals and cultivating a yearning for higher things. These are instruments of worthy might.

double take

On a garbled cell-phone connection with a senior of mine:

Heard: "I'd like to be a call boy for you."

?!

Pause.

Think.

Deciphered: "I'd like to be called going forward."

Aha!

Phew - good.

sidewalk and meeting

Some people resemble their dogs.
Some people resemble their ideas.

wise

Some people have the wise knack for suffering fools not lightly but productively.

african violet

This one won't be very clear. I'm thinking through something.

A fair number of people, especially good people, are possessed of a need to maintain a feeling. A person may need constantly to feel loved, or to feel hope, or to feel meaningful (or important or respected or successful).

And, of course, this is one of the two primary reasons people have pets - to have constant access to the preconditions to a certain, needed feeling (the other primary reason is a desire for fun, stimulating interactions). Typically, the pet owner who needs a feeling personifies more, projects more, and interacts with the pet in a richly interiorized manner. (The pet owner who wants fun tends to get out and play with her dog, or gets into breeding, or otherwise displays a rich external life with the pet.)

But one who needs a feeling usually doesn't have a pet. The feeling is itself cultivated, directly although usually not consciously. (For some people, it will be conscious: "I must maintain my sense of hope" -- this is a complication to the need that I'll come to later.)

This feeling, then, comes to center (or joins the other centers) the orbiting life of the needing person. Just as an eccentric orbit implies a planet's unseen center of gravity, an eccentric life (that is otherwise well-ordered) implies an individual's unseen center.

And that center may be what we are talking about now: a need to maintain a feeling. A life that is all stability and predictability is not best, even if it is ideal, strictly speaking. But there are only so many eccentric forces that a person can productively sustain. The need to maintain a feeling is hardly fatal, and not always even bad. But it always saps the limited momentum of a life, and for that reason, is to be avoided if possible.

I have no need to maintain any feeling. My maladies lie elsewhere. So I am alarmed when someone says -- actually says -- that he or she must have a particular feeling, that this feeling is their lifeblood. I hear addiction, and I fear a gravitation tug that threatens to yank their life entirely out of orbit. But -- and in this respect it is just like an addition -- such an acknowledged need is very hard to counteract effectively, and impossible to counteract (effectively or not) without force and collateral damage. Some people will be too weak to withstand the trauma of the repair, and can only be accommodated in their eccentric revolutions about their needed feeling. It is as if not Juliet, but a potted african violet, were the sun.

diurnal

The transition from day to night, and back again, is as much a part of one's self as some of the aspects more commonly taken to be intrinsic. And not only the transition, but also the sense of what belongs to night and what lives in the day, is impressed deeply. Just think of the richness, the cultural and personal and all-round elegant feeling of - evening.

And then, just now, to see that word typed out - evening - and to feel the interplay between the patent noun and the verb latent: well, the beauty of it. A poem of one word.

and down

I hadn't been on a thrill ride in years, but I took a notion to go to Six Flags, and went with some friends yesterday. And I rode roller coasters: lots of them, intense ones, repeatedly. And today I am down. Not depressed, not unproductive, but attitudinally down. It isn't even an emotion - it is a feeling, in the thinner sense of the word. I suppose this is a hormonal or neural reaction of some kind.

I push myself to include my body in my notion of who I really am, because that doesn't come easily and I think it is just. But on days like today, where there is such an obvious, nonrational physicality to how my body is, and how it is not like me and what I am doing, the push is useless and I can only think of my body as it, not me.

I'll go back to owning my own skin tomorrow, I suppose.

Monday

Arbeit versüßt das Leben. Generally, yes. Though in my view, and in my own life, I might have said: Arbeiten desinfiziert das Leben.

up

Give me a choice between one great book and one great roller coaster, with the other forever lost to me, and I'd choose the book, sure. But give me the same choice ten times, and I'd swap out a couple of the books for the steep drops and cheap thrills.

media

One of the clever Sunday school teachers I had as a child gave her class of 5-year-olds plastic bowls, and sent us to a table on the other side of the room to fill our bowls. On the table were some nice things: flowers, pine cones, feathers; and some bad things: crumpled old paper, lint, and what-not.

The point was, of course, "fill your bowl with nice things" - the bowl being your mind, and the table being your choice of what to think about and watch.

The excercise would be dopey, except that it was directed at 5-year-olds, for whom the transition from not putting lint in your mouth to not putting it in your cottony head runs down a short, clear path. But I can't help watching adults import news-related angst into their lives, to no purpose, without thinking that, folks, if you can't handle the news, and you're not involved in what's covered, you're actually better off, sad to say, with the childish lesson of bowls and feathers and lint.