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.