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.