little I

The image of the man sitting with his gold coins stacked on the table, counting them, counting them, is an image of spiritual smallness, even absurdity.  Yet I log on to my retirement account every day, and look at the balance, look at the balance.

thy

True love is a kind of inner work, neither passive nor discovered, but in a constant state of sustaining creation.

Willard

No candle, by burning, ever raises itself up, but only, slowly, burns itself lovely down.

more steel

The need to transcend death, and its handmaiden, age.  This need, heightened and sharpened, is its own fulfillment.  That is the truth of the resurrection.

steel of man

I wait to cross 58th Street, where they have been working and temporary plates of steel have been placed to cover the trenches.  Cars pass over the steel, an inch thick.  It gives an inch or so, but holds.  A dump truck filled to the brim with sand goes over.  The steel plate holds - an inch-thick plate of steel spanning a five-foot trench, holding up that passing weight.  A simple thing, but it awes me to think of what that material is doing, particularly on the stretching underside of the plate, the material holding itself together, no different than a cable stretched between two poles.  The passing truck, in every sense, depending from above.

Lyndon

Who isn't, partly, a scam artist?  Particularly to one's self.  Virtue in this is to be so slightly, and in a manner elevating and sound.  But perhaps I think of it wrongly - for sometimes it seems to me that there is something of the scam even in standing up and walking around.

quantum

Errol Morris's The Umbrella Man, a delight, put me in mind of one of those little historical facts that nearly awes me with its weird resonance: that Lyndon Johnson as a boy had a dog named "Bigham Young."

fought

As a personal, practical matter, I sometimes wonder whether freedom is anything but a facet of courage.

ipso facto

Within law - and I suppose within most fields - there are a handful of recurring ways in which research resolves.  To take two boring examples: a topic may turn out to be simply unknown to the literature or else clearly settled.  Some of the other pattern outcomes are more interesting.  For example, a topic may turn out to be a false topic - something that is actually about something else.  Or, a topic can be a unit finding exercise - really about whether an object is to be considered one or many.  And so on.

Vague I know.  But it enjoyable to get to the point in research where, even if I don't know the answers to my questions, I can at least look around and say ah yes, this kind of resolution again.

nearer

I turn off the DVD player
and it goes "beep beep."

From the bedroom,
sorting socks,
my love says
"beep beep."

And "beep beep"
I say back,
from the living room.

And all is well.
He and I
As two children
Amidst the snowy blank
That all the world is
But we to ourselves.

fissile

As an individual, it is one of the scariest large truths.  As an observer of mankind, it is one of the most beautiful: That the good human society is one that brings the twin suns of order and freedom into orbit around one another, and by orbiting around their center of gravity, itself empty, holds these fiery ideals in stable place, safely centered, far from the wider, cooler orbits of humankind within that greater social sphere.

110

A sort of fog of work - diffuse and everwhere, impossible to cut through.

could

Better than the veiled threat: the veiled promise.

transit

In some ways, I feel most alive and content walking from home to the station, and then from the station to the office - and back.  People's faces, all going somewhere. 

Vergerus

What is this body -
Fog obscuring,
Self itself
Or jug?

I wake;
I see light
And leap from bed
To feel myself young.

The body is time,
A seismograph's drum
Turning to record
Tremors amplified.

Instrumentation,
Organic springs
Uncoiling,
Trembling.

Wound once,
The tension
Drives, then slackens
Into reflection.

bifocal

One may be moral in the method, or moral in the aim.  Sometimes both, but either will do.  Only that is immoral which can be neither.  What is wrong aligns imperfectly with this.

you mean now?

what time is it
what time it is
is it what time
time what is it

another shimmering in the distance

More distant, fainter, but one feels a tremble of awe.  Not for the effectiveness, nor the faith, nor even the bravery.  Simply for the wonderful strangeness of mankind: Angels in Ciudad Juárez.

wtc

I look out my office window this morning and catch a steady sliver of lights, high behind the Chrysler Building to my south.  Stop, think, triangulate.  Ah!  It's the new World Trade Center, now peeking over the Midtown highrises, bare floors strung with temporary lamps.

silent

The conscience is useful fear.

to be seen

How little removed from animal is a man with no need for the regard of others.

jig

Intellegence is not likable. And that is the upended floor tack that made you dance.

fleur

BBC News is a very choice flower to have sprung from the corpse of empire.

sparta

Can the military aspects of a culture be beautiful?  I do not mean the ephemera of marching bands, uniforms and physicality, but the military as such.  The answer is yes, in the same way that the artistic, academic, child-rearing or sacred aspects of a culture may be beautiful.  The reason the question is hard is that violent killing - which is not only contrary to beauty but also to the good - is necessarily a capacity of military culture, and potentially its point.  But a military may be instead fundamentally about the control, regimentation - and thereby sublimation - of the violence naturally in man.  If and as a transcendence of violence, then, a military may be beautiful, even an object of proper love.  That appreciation is borne, though, of a hatred of violence, not a love for it, and that remains a control on the appreciation.  A bloodthirsty military, or a bloodthirsty military culture, cannot be beautiful.

genesis

The hatred of bloodshed is the beginning of wisdom.

wickedness in the public square

The rhetoric of "99%": bogus, arrogant and evil (because it viciously marginalizes and lies about those it makes into outsiders).  No different than its cousins on the right, the corresponding appropriations of "patriot," "American" and so forth.  I hate no individual, no group, but how I hate mass politics.  Right, left, whatever.  To be clear: mass politics is not the same as democracy.

student loans

I love the American people and count myself among them.  But the great body of the people ever shows its incapacity for self-governance.  Occupy Wall Street rivals even the Tea Party for obvious stupidity, sham, and bovine self-preoccupation.  Fortunately governance continues to come from the elite, who must create an ever more elaborate pantomime of democracy.  It is that necessity to create an ever more convincing show that is weighing us down.  Alas, even the elite must be anchored, and perhaps it is just as well that this be the mode of encumbrance.  It shunts so much malice and vengance away from bloodiness and towards language.  It pacifies, but is costly.

epithet

I think my father's epithet must be:  Father of children, child of God.

abba

One of the pillars of my life is that period of written correspondence between my father and me while I was in college.  We would write great, long letters to one another - thinking through the mysteries, the practicalities, the mechanisms of life.  I do not have these letters, except as digested into me. 

We never planned it - it just happened - and it drew to an easy close as I neared graduation.

As my mind expanded and matured, my father was there, not as physical presence, still less as a guide, but as the most resonant correspondent possible, a loving and joyous fellow traveler.  These letters were the secret backstory of my successful entry into adulthood, and of my time at St. John's.  The warmth, the thoughtfulness, the loving wisdom and playful theorizing we drew out from each other!  They were a beautiful flowering of my father's peculiar genius for being a father.  The greatest blessing of my upbringing was that: my father had a genius, and it was not for work, nor pleasure, nor even exactly for being a husband - it was and is for being a father.  My relationship to him was and is through his most exceptional facet.

We were each in a sort of prime then: he of early maturation, I of new adulthood.  I think we are each in a more foolish stage at present - productive middle passages where the deeper faculties wait: his for retirement, mine for maturation.

Someday we will resume our correspondence, and in the same way, resume ourselves.

old

It doesn't do to be too frank about what a burden we all are to one another.

regal

The motivating power of ideals and illusions are well known.  Why do these motivate better than realities?  Answer: when they are stark, realities motivate just as well as ideas, but realities are rarely stark.  Artifices may be made simple and stark.  That is one why self-projection has value.  One may make one's self motivating by simplified projection.  Others may do the same with their image of you, and this is what your loved ones do - they simplify you into lovability - but most will not love you until you are idealized, and this is likely only if you take the first steps yourself.

years ago

He turned to me at the bar, and talked to me until his beer went warm in his hand.  A mama's boy, finishing college, majoring in zoology.  He wanted to be an elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo.  That was the only thing he wanted, all he had wanted since he was a child.  He wanted it with the simplicity of a saint's faith.  I probed, conversationally: Was there any possibility the job would not be all he hoped?  None.  What if he couldn't get the elephant-keeping job at the San Diego Zoo?  He would, but he allowed that there were a few other zoos he could imagine working at.  Already he was keeping exotic livestock behind his mother's trailer.  And what if even those jobs were not available?  He would have this job, period - he was absolute.  I marveled.  He gave off the scent of cedar chips, and ever since they have been to me the smell of his beautiful fanaticism.

bowing

Passing at 5am in a cab by a diner, I see a drunkard, not so old or far gone, beg from a bus boy, neither young nor instantly dismissive, coming off his shift. 

The drunkard stretches his begging arms out in front of him, at a low angle, close together.  Please, he gestures.  The bus boy exchanges a few words.  The drunkard points with his whole right arm horizontal; and then makes large, arcing circles with his hands, from him mouth to his belly.  Over there; listen to what happened.  The bus boy detaches and walks on.  The drunkard follows for a few paces, bowing and scraping, still talking.  And then, seeing he is getting nothing, straightens up, turns, heaves his shoulders, and walks away.  All this time, the drunkard has had an orange, hanging in a plastic bag he's knotted onto the front belt loop of his jeans.  The orange swings in the bag as he walks away, like a sight gag, like truck nuts.  The light turns green and my cab drives on.

His gestures were each that of the silent movie pantomime.  Where did they come from?  Partly he is imitating - imitating from childhood, imitating movies, even imitating other drunks he's seen.  A little of it is the shift to major muscle groups that anyone makes when alcohol impairs fine motor control.  But mostly, it is a combination of that innate to us, and the physical interpretation of basic words.

But to see the naturalness of that bowing, the crooking at the hips as the drunkard made his last try!  This is real bowing, the kind that comes from the heart and says damn it I want something from you!

heat

In terms of taste, what is trash, really, and what is its place?  It is that, and so placed, as to destabilize just such questions.

infrared

The good horse balks
At something sensed;
So rider knows it too.
An animal connecting
The thing, perception, you.

The eyes glance round and
Will would press on but
Wait for confirmation.
You know this horse is true,
Senses something here.

The small hairs raise,
Ganglia flash and small breaths
Through the nose
Smell nothing.

But by your steed,
You know danger is nigh.

You hold your reigns and
Pace slow
And arrive
By instrumentation.

Missa Solemnis

Listening to the London Symphony and their choir last night, something about Beethoven became clear to me: that he is serious about degree of loudness as a scale, as a compositional dimension.  I realized this after becoming frustrated with it.  If loudness is a secondary or crude quality of music - and it usually is - then Beethoven's constant alterations in loudness come across as a cheap trick, overwrought, or just ugly.  But Beethoven means to treat loudness more seriously, more dynamically, and if you can make that shift as a listener, the beauty and craft are there to hear. What we do now with reprocessing of sound - of electronic manipulation - is a further elaboration of the same.

rust

Let sureness like beauty
Draw all eyes to
Virtue and power,
That in unity
Ring as bell and tongue
To tell all drawn
That truth like dew
Is pure and new
But burning ever,
Into rust of light.

owing

Society is constructed of many elements, but the chief elements are few: debt, reproduction, optimism, limits, honor, fear and love - on an instant's thought, these come to mind.

welcome

I love that my undergraduate college had an open admissions policy.  But it sure shows in the quality of graduates produced.  Remember that input is the better part of output.

Doug the Ford Spokespuppet

Tunionaire.  Great moments in comedy.

depending from the lining

You know the trope from old television where the shady man, brim of his hat turned down low, opens one breast of his trenchcoat to reveal obviously stolen goods and says You wanna buy a watch?

I saw this today.  I'm in a cab to work, 5am, and the driver stops at a light in Queens.  Prime taxi location: on one side, a gas station with a taxi at every pump, fueling up for the morning shift.  On the other side, a dark sidewalk and a stocky guy in a heavy parka (it's warm out), wearing sunglasses (it's dark out).  With one hand, he opens his parka, and there, faintly glowing, is a Garmin nüvi GPS, clipped to the interior pocket.  He makes eye contact with my driver and with his other hand, points out the GPS.  In a second, it's over.  No deal.

I say he pointed, but really he used that shallow cupping gesture a model on a game show uses to emphasize a small-sized prize.  A year's supply of Dawn dishwashing liquid.  Back to you, Bob.

gazing

I read this morning that there are more birdwatchers than classical music concert goers in this country.  I suppose that makes sense.  Birdwatching costs less, is less well defined, more widely available and the optic nerve is bigger.

Burma

The greatest of all historical precursors to political freedom is having been a British colony. Objectively speaking, there is no greater modern national blessing than that, for a country not actually in Europe.

immaculate conception not required

It is of crass things that true virtue is often born.  In the public arena, false virtue can give birth to true virtue when fertilized by little more than ambition and honor-seeking. John Adams believed that, and so do I.

To put it a touch more fully, history teaches me that the birth of civic virtue is a rare thing, but can result when, all together, merchants seek opportunity, political leaders seek approbation, and there is some form of national discourse about right and wrong. The latter is and must be objectively weakest, but even a little will suffice.

formation

What makes my mother happy these days is clearing a path.  When I was eleven and twelve, clearing paths made me happiest, too.  Paths through the wood, or two paths, meeting at the brambles, passing the lovely stump, with its crumbling interior forming a pool for rain water.  Saw and pruning shears, hoe and rake.  Birds and rabbits, snakes and ivy.

on his shoulder

Probably the saddest of sentences, if only you know it's context: "Am I standing straight enough, uncle?"

next

Who would be at his ease in this wicked world?

gamble

We make so little of our will.  "Strange males, unfamiliar hands, the touch of a foreigner's blood."

irony

A feeling of independence is usually borne of insulation.

cost

You know things are getting serious when someone asks what money is worth.  I sure am.

to do

To be professionally excellent, one must be good at everything, or seem so.
Nobody is individually good at everything.
Therefore, professional excellence is a matter maximizing one's own good abilities, and then of seeming, or of appropriating through staffing, the good things one individually lacks.

logic

Here in the office,
Blue wool carpet
Does not imply blue sheep.

Tatiana

There is this strange, opalescent, dialog near the middle of Smiley's People.  Smiley meets Tatiana, posing as a man sent to substitute for her minder.  She has been locked away, but gently - in a far away health clinic.  All the forces that hold her there are shadowy, distant, yet somehow paternal.  Smiley asks her if she knows who her father is.  "He is a man too important to exist."  And a few lines later, she asks if Smiley is God.  "No.  I am an ordinary man."  "I have heard that a little of God exists in every ordinary man," she replies.  And Smiley says "I too have heard that said."

Hearing her and he talk so obliquely about what Job talked about, in tones like those of an oboe and bassoon - well, I marvel at it.

metaphor

Let's take Manhattan?

press

Real men don't moan.  Not often or long, anyhow.

take

This feeling of being an outsider, an underling.  There is no point to thinking it can be excised.  I shall have to continue to leverage it, but better.

interact

No functional system is all even exchange (even over time), nor is any functional system all exchange-agnostic (communistic).  There are ebbs and flows.  This is true emotionally as well as functionally.  One reason for the intensity and strangeness of the right-wing American attachment to the military is exactly this: it is a communal institution to which patriotic homage can yet be paid - a noneconomic element of common life.

Lothian

Never take a circuit court's word for it.

provision

Law is the stable interface by language of force, resource, and personal integrity.

well

So this new book on debt is ok so far and I'll learn things and have thoughts to think through.  Fair enough - not a classic.  But it is useful to see that the moral valence of indebtedness in general is both ambivalent and not worse than that of the creditor.

the chicken did

A new book on the history of debt?  Yes, please.  I haven't started yet, but apparently it's going to say that debt came before currency, and even before barter, in human history.  (The usual notion is that barter came first, then currency addressed barter's limits, and currency enabled complex movements like debt and credit.)

So I'll wait to see what the book says.  But for now, just the idea is exciting and plausible.  A goat, field or hour of labor can be borrowed even more easily than it may be bartered.  And a pre-existing debt would expand the range of goods a creditor might feel willing to accept.  Indeed, it might expand that range all the way across to a token.

It also addresses the economy of prophesy and religion, which is never a matter of barter, but always of promise (that is, of debt).

Can't wait to start this book! (Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.)  Hopefully it won't disappoint.

know

Experience beats intelligence nearly every time, although not by a mile.  Novel situations demand intelligence.  Indeed, much of the value of intelligent experience is to see the novel aspects of an otherwise long-experienced situation.

poking

I would guess that the first function of an intelligence agency, even after it becomes capable of spying, remains the work of finding and sifting information that is simply out in the open.

presentation

Fact + force = truth

Myth has greater impact than fact over certain parts of every human mind, and over certain human minds.  And these are significant parts and many people.

Facts must be made weighty, given the stained glass coloring of awe, the distant quake of canonnade, rolling into position.  Or else they are only facts.

ˉ ˘ ˉ

Now is our glorious summer made a wintry discontent.

(By the way, note the special metrical qualities of discontent, particularly at the end of sentence.)

more gravity

One source of intellectual lift is a desire to impress others, the sense of an audience - mating displays, as it were.

gravity

I always have felt the need to be both substantive and connective in my writing and even thoughts.  But this can leave me feeling mentally sticky - glued down - weighted.

makes the whole world kin

Just an hour at a major international gateway - I spent one at JFK's Terminal 4 yesterday - and you see that what business enables is the travel of families, of loved ones, of others of one's tribe and place.  It is beautiful, although in cold fact it is only the releasing of tensions caused in the first place by commerce, and by the same means.

more Warren

Remember that this is still, basically, the working off of a housing bubble atop a consumer credit bubble.

Warren

To be governed by the people is to be governed by what governs the people.  And that may be many things, and shift for any given people over time.  Fortunately a governing desire to live is more or less a popular constant.

think again

Middlemarch has long been my nominee for the finest work originally written in English.  But I wonder, on this re-reading, whether Eliot would agree.  I think there is more than narrative voicing behind some of the doubt the narration betrays.  Eliot seems ever to be shoring up her entirely sound literary structures.  It is strange to see the Rock of Gibraltar, buttressed.

middle age

Eliot describes the lost radiance of a character not by saying she had "dimmed" but by describing her as "rayshorn" - that is beautiful.

bridges falling down

Rioting and looting are mere criminality?  Not so.  It is theatrical criminal behavior: an acting out of unposessed power, apparent solidarity, unfulfillable appetites and greed.  They put upon their heads the ancient crown of stones, because it is has presented both itself and a stage, upon which, one may feel momentarily that one is not a eunuch, a crowdsman, almost an animal, although yesterday and tomorrow and tomorrow, one is.  Rioting is a sort of public masturbation, and as empty and offensive - and telling - as that.

parch

My mind has gone rather terribly dry.  There must be the right sort of water around here somewhere.

subway types

Guys - busboys, deliverers, construction laborers - earnestly writing in little spiral-bound lined notebooks, in big round block letters, with a blue ball-point pen.  Not studying or communicating, just writing to - well, what?  I tend to think of these as calmly-contained but inwardly passionate people.  Or hotly intelligent without much scope for opportunity of thought.  Self-contained or context-bound, that is.  A small whorl of inner life.  Comparatively talentless brethren of Emily Dickinson, but brethren all the same.  That last sentence could be applied to me, I suppose, though none of what preceeded it.  Makes the whole world kin - the subway, I mean.  That and unfounded assumptions about others.

take 3

No, your opponents are not crazy.  Their arguments are tactical and they are fighting an adjacent battle.

kept

Would you be king?  Then make a small kingdom.  But make it here in the world, even as expressed fiction, and not internally.

next

The political situation is an improved reflection of, the electorate.  Nothing has happened that would have been avoided, or even been as good, if the people ruled directly.

oh, for a...

I return to reading Middlemarch, and feel the sort of despair that comes in the presence of beautiful greatness.  If Eliot is human, how can I be?  Or so runs the feeling.

say

The more intelligent you are - or more precisely, the more often right you actually are - the more aggressive you should be.  Do not hide your light under a bushel basket.

day

I would be far more intellegent, were it mine to give myself.  But would the world not be a happier, even better place if we were all less intellegent?

risk

I know my limits too well, because it is in my knowing them that they have their being.

pointing

Most rudeness is symbolic violence or exposure.  Or, most politeness is symbolic nonviolence and covering.

ask again

Having worked with a client to get him ready for a cross-examination, I can say: interrogation can be a beautiful thing, in itself, and wonderful for truth-seeking.

Hamilton

One thing I just realized: each institution (House, Senate, Executive) acted in the debt ceiling wrangle exactly as designed.

dew

Mortality is the genesis of youth.

yesterday

And the people will, as always, luxuriate in insulting their representatives, deplore what had to be done, and wallow in their sovereign laziness and stupidity.  I'd rather be governed by the worst twenty congressional representatives - freed from the constraints of the people - than be governed by the people.  Except for one, sufficient matter, that makes a democracy supporter of me, after all: our system suppresses domestic bloodshed with great success.

tomorrow

What the ignorant bring upon themselves is the clearest testament to the value of what Ecclesiastes calls having eyes in one's head.

Tuesday

The irrational agents of an inevitable reckoning have arrived.

here

A good deal of professional entrepreneurship occurs in big professionals firms - the firm is simply offloading much of the difficult and unproductive back office and networking functions.  The big firm professional is often more independent, in practice, than the formally independent professional who is tied down arranging his own office space, and so forth.

bureau again

That place is going to take a while to make any sense of itself.  And to think of the headwinds.  And the unstable structure for provision of leadership!

hot

There's a plot of grass in Astoria, near Steinway Street, that has ring-shaped dead patches, not quite a meter in diameter.  Roughly the size of a manhole cover - and my best theory as to what caused them was that the sod was layed over manhole covers, and the seep of air - laden with who-knows-what, up from the lip of these unseen covers, was killing the grass.  Or maybe an oily tire had laid there and poisoned the ground underneath.  Or what?  But then, a while ago, I realized that the rings were worked into the soil - indented by an inch or so.

And this morning, I saw a pigeon pacing this ring - and another pigeon pacing one of the others.  Round and round.  What's going on?

Did the pigeons cause it?  Are the pigeons responding to something?  Why? What? How? Huh?

(My new best guess: manhole covers and pigeons.  I think that plot of grass used to be a parking lot, and the soil was just laid over it.  If there's a drainage system, and what had been drainways have been covered over with manhole covers, the soil may be just a bit cooler around those rings.  Possibly there's a tad of cool air flow, even, up from the dry pipes.  The pigeons may like that, and tread in a cool path, especially on a hot day like this.

Maybe.

induction

Thinking through the implications of trust and mistrust.  Time to pick up Hume again?

biblical

Truly, without vision, the people perish.

57/3

The power of the referential over the direct (which has advantages enough) is this: the reference is felt to be in the mind or ether, and is therefore felt more directly.  The direct is felt to be in the object, and is therefore more obdurate, more sure, but less directly present to the perception.  As smells are to the sense of smell, so is an evocative reference to the faculty of perception: like all parents, it looks upon the perception with a special and tender immediacy, made all the more poignant because it does not attribute this to its creation of the beloved, whose qualities, to perception, are therefore all the more affecting.  The angel that is not on the sidewalk, but merely evoked, is therefore felt as more noteworthy than the improbably planted trees, the passers-by, each a miracle, or even the wondrous assembly itself, that thin-shaved slide-sample of my city.

time-wracked

Very old men occasionally attain a sort of spectral quality.  A face that age has made almost not human, but humanoid - yoda-like or otherwise.  In a hospital, this is nothing - the context so explains the transformation that there is nothing remarkable to it.  But walking past you on the sidewalk in the sunlight, basically strong and self-possessed, an old man like this really can seem an apparition, a vision, an angel.

angel

Walking in to work I pass a stream of cars that block most of the sun light on the avenue.  And for a second, their traffic leaves a perfect ball of bright light on the sidewalk that arcs like a softball thrown underhanded.  The arc of that light was uncanny - it rose and fell as if by gravity.

Something passes through my mind, involuntarily - a feeling of apparition, of vision, and then I catch the eyes of a fellow pedestrian.  He saw it too, and felt it as I did.

How our minds seize on such things, nothings, as carriers of meaning!

you

The trouble of our decade is that it is under a lid.  That lid is the previous generation.  They will grow heavier until the time when we ourselves are weak.  There is nothing for it but to steam.

bad city

On the train this weekend I had a few minutes to overhear the ideas of a young teenage boy - I'd guess he was thirteen - talking to a girl who could have been a sister or classmate or girlfriend.  He was going a mile a minute, full of ideas.  The one I overheard:

"I don't think people should have to go to jail if they're bad.  If you want to obey the rules, you can stay here.  But if you want to be bad, you have to go to a bad city, and you can do what you want there, but other people there will be bad to you.  If you leave and come back here, you have to be good."

This is the sort of idea that bodes well for the kid's future, if he keeps it up.  Plenty is wrong with the notion, but that's the point.  Chasing down the flaws will lead him deeper and deeper in thought.  Also, his idea of "bad cities" has a fine intellectual and literary pedigree, leading all the way back to cities of refuge, both as real places (in various guises) and as the lovely but daft notion in the Pentateuch that forgiveness could be made politically spatial.

On a different subject, note that there was no way for me to tell from a few short minutes if the kid is smart or not - that is, to tell his intelligence.  All I know is that he is thoughtful.  And that is a more meritorious thing than intelligence.  Of course, I hope for his sake he has the whole mental kit.

Disraeli

The social capacity of England for drama is a confluence that grew self-reinforcing centuries ago, and strangely remains.  That it is an isle is one stream in the confluence - and the other streams are similarly innocuous, apart.

get off

A few people have complete leverage.  Only a few of them know how to use it.  Caro talks about LBJ knowing where to find power and knowing how to use it - that's a profound ability.

so and so

Oh, man, I've just got to say it, right here on my blog:

----- ----- is a real -----.

And I don't care who knows it.

tannins

There isn't going to be much of a popular constituency for doing less with more, even when that is what is required.

The trouble in here, and elsewhere, is that antiauthoritarian forces are in ascendancy because the means of communication are too easily available for effort - the old filter - to function as any barrier to thoughtless expression and coalescence.  The effects on institutions and on stable, orderly change are all too predictable.

pounds

By one account, education is a means to greater freedom, and to seeking the ends to which freedom is itself a means.  By another account, education is a means to income and security.  These are compatible accounts, taken at face value.  That the latter crowds out the further in practice indicates clearly that the face value of these statements is not the working value of either.

watchtower

I don't suppose there will be a Broadway play based on the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Too down-market, for one thing.

ting

Drop a coin on a hard floor.  Ting.  Sounds like the best sorts of departures feel.  A corner turned, sharply, soldierly.

music of the inner spaces

It isn't a difficult point to perceive, or make, but is worth registering:  we place sensations differently.  Sight reaches out, brings in.  Sound - logically no different - is often the same, but can give the impression of being internal - of driving one's consideration within.  Smell is about nearness and placement.  Taste and touch are contact, one within, the other upon.

oboe

An great pain, remembered, stretches out to occupy more past time than it took to occur.  And in so stretching, it changes timbre, and becomes supple, a sort of beautiful, oboe's bruise.

Oh! I guess that's kinda what you were going for.

Broadway's The Book of Mormon has such beautiful moments, piercing through the comedy.  In "I Believe" - that moment of realized purpose.  In "Man Up" - the entirely successful, even standard, pre-intermission juxtaposition of character movements.  Above all, in "All-American Prophet" - Joseph Smith's dying epiphany, and the sweet respect accorded it.

Tinker

Great lines:

"We've had enough!"
"And like anyone who's ever had enough, you want more."

nether

Decency can be thought of as a very serious form of taste.

quiver full

Hamilton's letters to his friends are breathtaking.  Gobsmacking.  They are brilliant and loyal, but clumsy, hasty, resentful, crude, overblown.  This is a man that, to be made useful, probably required all the tact and pose and gravity of Washington.  Who come to think of it probably needed a few sticks of human dynamite like Hamilton in his retinue.

trains and planes

So the advertisement in the elevator this morning was: "We make planes.  We make trains.  Bombardier: the only maker of planes and trains."  And I think: whoop de doo.  And then I think: what are they trying to say and to whom and to what end?  I haven't a clue.

below

Now and then one becomes aware of Earth.  Not where we live, but under it - the underlying, planetary earth.  An earth for which the continents and oceans would be no more than freckles or the hair on one's leg, were it not that the rises and trenches are, physically speaking, from the Earth.

And then of the atmosphere, properly part of the Earth but separate to our conception because we live between what is above and below. 

And that is the point: we exist across a vast and fertile surface of contact, a laminate of earth and air, a laminate that works upon solar light and heat and other energy, primarily at the surface of contact.

Certain plastics, each porous or weak when formed into films, can become impassible or strong when laminated together.  More precisely, it is the the interaction at the contact surface between the two materials is impassible or strong.  That contact surface is not a third substance, but rather the properties of contact between the two: it is the contact itself that yields the useful characteristics.

So it is with Earth - the vitality is at the surface, between earth and air, borne of contact.

So it is with people - the metaphor of a person's depths misunderstands that what is deepest about a person is not his innermost thoughts, just as a person's core is not his weightiest part.  The soul is at the skin.  The most important things about a person are right upon the surface - and exist by his contact with others.

Hamilton

Every one in every age has trouble, trouble, trouble.  So be not discouraged at your troubles.  You are not dead, nor imprisoned, nor without help and strength.  You face nothing but what is common to man - and still more common to the beasts and birds, which cannot come in from the freezing cold and burning sun, as you can.  March on.

where angels fear

In a way, nothing changes: nearly everything human falls into two domains:

• Outside: Hunt, Fight, Cultivate, Construct, Defend.
• Inside: Procreate, Rear, Know, Love, Pacify.

FDR, JFK, LBJ

One of my professional acquaintances has taken to referring to himself in the third person with his initials.  Where he used to say "I'll deliver the document," he now says "The JFK document will be delivered."  (Obviously not his initials.)

On the one hand, this fellow has moved pretty far up in our corner of the world - he's a Big Guy now.  On the other hand: Good Grief!  This guy has an ego like LBJ.

doing

Working clears and energizes the mind, up to a point.  Whether that work is physical or not.

blockages

I'm have no particular interest in dreams.  But lately my dreams have recurrently been about clogs: clogged pipes, clogged filters, clogged alleyways, and so on.  And I can't help but wonder: what's up with that?

Stuntz

Prof. Klarman eulogized Bill Stuntz as the complete law professor, in that he was:

• an inspiring teacher,
• a pathbreaking scholar,
• a fabulous colleague,
• an extraordinary institutional citizen, and
• an outstanding person.

Aside from being true of Bill Stuntz, that's a useful run through, if generalized, of what all professionals should aim to excel at:

• one's daily work,
• one's innovative work,
• one's collegial interactions,
• one's part in larger institutions or communities, and
• one's humanity.

cultural

Back in New York.  And how.  The placard at the Starbucks I passed this morning reads:

Connect and access free premium content.

Every word except and in this sentence is a buzzword.  Think how culturally specific it is.  How much cultural content it takes even to know what it means.  How much more it takes to find it appealing.

Sky Harbor

A vacation is done well when it is contentedly turned in for a ticket home.

grand

The Grand Canyon is well named.  It has a grandeur that I think people are ill equipped to process.  One feels as numbed as awed.  The mind searches for something to focus on - the geological processes, some particular tree or stone, the scale of time.  But to look at the thing is partly to feel the chasm without cut a chasm within.  It is a silencing, as well as silent.  It is less a place, more a space, almost a void, although the beauty of the stone saves it from quite being that.

samaritans

It's my vacation.  I was driving along Indian Route 8 this morning, headed for Walpi.  It was an unpaved and rough road, but firmly packed and usable.  That is, until I hit a patch of soft desert sand.

Down sinks my rental car, until the underbody of the car is resting flat on the sand.  I'm out of cell phone range, it's hot, and I haven't passed a car in forty miles.

I get out and start sweeping the sand from under my car - but if I excavate enough to have a chance of driving out, the car will more likely just sink further unless, by chance, there's only a few inches of sand, then something firm beneath.  I feel down and that seems to be so, but who knows?  And can I sweep this much away with my hands?

I keep going, I'll figure something out if I have to, but someone will have to come.  I'm in the middle of nowhere.  I had put two gallons of water in my trunk the day before and I think about that.  At least the sand is easy to manipulate.

After a while - twenty minutes or so - a pickup truck passes me, swerving to avoid the sand and me, and stops ten yards further along, at the far crest of the little dip I'm in.  Four Hopi men, two riding in the bed of the pickup truck, a driver and a passenger in the cab, all stocky, sun creased, and reassuring.  They pile out and head my way.

Says the driver to the others: "Come on - he got in the soft blow sand."  He means, I suppose, that this is blowing sand that collects in this dip of the landscape.  That makes sense, and explains why it is so loose and fine. 

Without saying anything to me first, or even making eye contact, he and then they get down with me and start sweeping sand out from around the car, all of us with our bare forearms.

"We'll have to get some brush and stuff it under to give traction."  That makes sense to me, and there's a mound of tumbleweed collected in the same dip as I'm stuck in, so that won't be hard.  I'm reassured.

Then: "Here comes my brother."  What does he mean - I hear nothing.  But a minute later, even I can make out the sound of another approaching truck.  What a sense of hearing!

Now there are eight of them, plus one of me.  They don't talk to each other, just work.  The brother asks me, "Where are you going?"  I say "Walpi" and he says "That's our town; you're about there - this is the only bad spot on the road."

The work is done in less than an hour.  When one guy slows his digging a bit, the driver says to him, neither soft nor loud, just plain: "Use muscle."  And the guy does.

Sand cleared, brush stuffed behind the tires and everywhere else. "You have to steer." says the driver, and I do.  It's the first thing he's said to me directly.  I do steer, and it works on the second big push they all give me.

So now I'm up on the next little rise from all of them.  Safe.  I stuff a hundred dollars, all I have, in my pocket to hand to them. 

But as I get out of my car, ready to walk back over to them and thank them, they break into great, open smiles, all of them, then begin to climb back into their trucks.  Suddenly, to give them money feels wrong, even insulting.  So instead I give a big wave, one with my whole arm like I don't generally give, trying to say "thank you" with my wave.  They wave back, still smiling big, and go wherever they were headed before stopping for me.

As I drive away I think back and try hard to fix the memory in my mind.  I think how they had made no small talk, no jokes, said nothing the entire time but what was needed.

I finish the drive to their town - a dreary looking place.  I don't get out.  I drive on.  This is their home, not really for tourists, even if it is in the Rough Guide to the Southwest.  I'm only a tourist if I get out.  But if I stay in my car, I can be the fellow human they helped, and I want to be that.  Anyhow, that's how it felt to me, and why I drove on.

I think of them, the Good Samaritans, these Hopi men, the salt of the earth.  And I would feel embarrassed about the incident if I didn't, instead, feel so elated, somehow blessed.

striking

What is it about cliff-dwellings that draw us so?  It isn't the history, or even exactly the beauty: give me something equal in those respects and they still wouldn't strike us so.  It tells us more about us than them.

Mesa Verde

I climb down the ladder and look at the ruins at Balcony House, tucked so improbably into a cliff's ledge, and think to the builders and inhabitants: what were you doing there?

And they seem to say back to me, as I get into my car an hour later: what are you doing here?  And I think: brethren.

committee

Charm, reason and certainty.  That's a winning package in a group discussion of ten or twenty.

Wiegle

I had forgotten how beautiful the Santa Fe campus of St. John's is.  How it is like honey and lemon - the bright sharpness of the location, the campus itself flowing slowly and sweetly down the mountainside.

Scibona

paragraphs are themselves organized into larger units that work, roughly speaking, as sentences formed from paragraph-words.  And some paragraphs punctuate.

the heavens

Meanwhile, high above all we are and do, yet entirely among us, is heaven.

http://youtu.be/kLVDXdBo9ys
http://youtu.be/CjV_hZ9qBfc
http://youtu.be/M9P4SxtphJ4

Triumphs of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

nondischargability

Negative net worth is a powerful motivator, but only if there are future prospects.

notion

You know, wow.  Giving that guy an idea is like giving a sock to a puppy.  He will not let go.

it's relative

I get on the subway and two guys, businessmen I guess, are midstream in conversation:

"So I got it for her, but it was $250,000."
"Oh."
"I mean, that's a lot of money."
"Yeah."
"I mean, you could get four cars for that!"

And I do the mental math, suppress a double take and figure that - hell - from his perspective, that was probably about right.

dis or dat

Courts prefer to think categorically, and courts will generally shift a question or controversy into a form that permits it to decide that X belongs, or does not belong, to category Y.

sunday school

The life you live molds you into the person that lives it.

complaint box

The health obsessions of others are tiresome.

go

Self-suppression is as important as self-expression if there is to be self-realization.  To create one's self by losing one's self is the mightiest path.

scotch

The glance and smile
More at the eyes than lips,
More in the cheeks than
Centered, sets me off.

Sets me thinking of
What else could be so,
Some better and more
Domineering way.

But then I let my mind
Play out the reel. And,
I'd rather be real with you
Than have my fantasies.

While

An even keel, honesty, and a straightforward presentation, in court at least, can be very effectively punctuated by one or two momentary bursts of outrage.  When justified, of course.

simple

Ryan, Bloomberg, Obama - the sort of guys I like in politics.

Triantis

It is an anthropomorphic fallacy that anything is better than "death" for a non-living entity, such as a corporation.  A company should be willing to pay a certain amount to avoid liquidation, but not more.

accretion of pleasure

Some living, social connections grow organically, but appear as steel.  This is not fakery, but camouflage, and the difference between the two could not be more important.

Marshall

The second tier of the founding fathers, in particular, were seeking honor.  The American revolution would not have succeeded without this.

sale!

I occasionally toy with an idea - plainly false but interesting as an experiment - that the prominence of a thing accurately and automatically indicates its importance.  That, as a result, consumption really is the great pursuit of mankind and that the most important thing I thought today was "chicken on rice" because that was the message that flashed the largest and brightest past my view as I walked in.

objectively cornered

There are any number of situations in which no further movement is appropriate without more facts.  A key move of strategy is to avoid such situations.

Cain and Abel

Is the problem suffering or is the problem consciousness?  It depends on which came first, or more precisely which is emergent.  It may seem grotesque to suggest that a reduction in either suffering or consciousness is equally humane, but in fact we know this and it is why we put televisions in hospital rooms.

But the deeper point is exactly deeper: if consciousness rose up, in the course of time, out of an unconscious, primeval past, then suffering is simply part of the conscious experiencing of what was always there.  The solution, in this case, is to reduce the kind of experiencing that is taken as suffering.  Consciousness-altering.  To be sure, to the extent this primary response is limited, a secondary response - reducing the environmental predicates of suffering - is appropriate.  But consciousness-altering remains the first response, both in sequence and in importance.

If, on the other hand, an unsuffering consciousness was first, and suffering arrives as a corruption of that prior state, then the priority is exactly the reverse.

Eastern and Western religions.

after TR

Courtesy and courage are the mark of a man.

middlemarch

All roads bend: even the straightest path clings to a declining earth.

not enough sleep

In which I make bad advertising for a hypothetical bankruptcy practice:

"Rely on Smith & Jones LLP: when only the best business failure will do."

now

To tackle a project, what's called for is aggresive cooperation.

Grant

Noisy malcontents: "there are always more of them before they are counted."

oaken

There is little use to sweetness in a man.

Quinlan

More Americans should understand the Mexican war, and just what a long and continuing history we have of being a rotten neighbor.

not a speck of cereal

I walk down the sidewalk and pass, sitting out among the trash to be taken away, a large and lavishly framed cross stitch of a cat atop a vine covered wall, on which the inscription: "In memory of beloved Pearly, 1986-1991."

And I wonder: which died first?  The love for this pet, the tolerance for the cross stitch memorial, or the owner? 

Pitiful, really, and a reminder of Morris's Gates of Heaven, which is one of those treatments that transcends its subject. 

And that pitiful, beautiful name!  Pearly.  Only a cat lover would name a cat...that.

in a state

A word that glows, in its different but connected meanings, like an ember: state.

West Point

That Lincoln can so write seems only a facet of that wonderful man, and therefore not a wonder in itself.  But that Grant can write, and so write, is a thing of wonder and humbles his reader.

between two chairs

My honor is my fidelity?

with

All relationships, even the best ones, are costly, bulky and nettlesome.  Have them anyway.

we

There is a wildness to loving,
A zoology of two, a fertile zone
Of diatomaceous space that
Teems by our embrace.

iron

To survive, most people will do anything.

iron

Combat is a sacrifice of even the victorious soldier.

more

That is to say, it should be a functional illusion.

proposition

Rational movement is the result of calibrated imbalance.

worlds collide

Here I am with my phone, on hold with Singapore Airlines.  Their hold music is Johnny Cash, but with pan pipes added in.  The mental fuses pop.

casus belli

Worth reflection: we feel conflicts have to be about something.

state's rights

Procedure is the first refuge of the scoundrel, even if patriotism is the last.

More seriously, there's a running question of whether the American Civil War was over slavery or state's rights.  But it is a foolish question.  The Lincoln-Douglas gets at it plainly: the rights of states are nothing but the field of action over which the slavery issue moves.  At any point, the winning side will want to limit the impedance of the field to its prevailing movement, while the other side seeks to increase the difficulty of the terrain.

encampment

One of the many lessons of the American Civil War is that reason and right are no match for economic interest and regional unity...until violence commences.  If and when violence does commence, the side with the better part of reason and right has an edge.

Congressional Globe

Rereading the Lincoln-Douglas debates is an education in the limits of any man, even Lincoln, and - moreso - in the limits of public discourse.  Over thirty hours of intellegent, intensive discourse - even that much of it - only get you so far.

Asbury Park

People will take their pleasure and not make sense.  They just will.  It is what most people do.

living

Little is deserved, much is gotten.

clap

The pathways of elaborate ignorance are ample, pleasurable, heavy trod.  And down them ride all enemies and most wealth.

yesterday

There is a lifelong dance between your will and your native capacity, to the tune of your situation.  If you have the will of Fred Astaire but your capacity is not Ginger Rogers, you get nowhere by pretending otherwise.  You have to adjust.  Fred would.

Joseph Story

What everybody understands, even though it is disturbing, is that the taking of great pleasure from something is usually in maw of being consumed by that something.

slouch

A pattern of casual sex is usually a sign of boredom borne of personal limitations.  By casual I mean neither extramarital, nor fascinated, nor passionate, but truely and sadly casual.

tree

A world outside consciousness exists only within it.

words I rarely need

Turret.

Stonewall

Get off my back! says the Americans.

today

The fundamental (although in practice usually not the most salient) reason for a compound form of government can be simply put:  ordinary people, particularly en masse, are unfit to rule, yet only the people have legitimacy to rule and can do so safely.

Practically speaking, as I say, there are more salient reasons for compound government in practice: anti-corruption, extensibility, and so on.

squint

One of the odder self-delusions is that of those who traffic in vice with the notion that they will have less competition - because of ubiquitous virtue.

dude

Adventures in advanced homosexuality: two homosexual males establishing a social friendship by straight means, that is, a bromance.  Layers of presentation cast in the role of peeling some back.

the stuff one dreams of

Says Brooks today, of one future possibility: "Alternatively, insiders like the Simpson-Bowles commission or the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Six” could assert authority and recreate a strong centrist political establishment, such as the nation enjoyed in the 1950s."  If only.

hearth god

A fine young fellow, who's talking to me about school, with an eye towards his career to follow, asks: "Am I Corporate enough?"  He asks it with enough intensity and sincerity to suggest a willingness to set up a secret alter to Goldman Sachs in his bedroom.  Naturally I tell him it's the wrong question.  But the need in that question, and the object of that need!  This is humankind.

demos

In politics and economics, sooner or later, the solution becomes the problem.  Sooner, if the solution is left absolute, due to its inflexibility in the face of variation.  Later, if the solution is elaborated, because of it encumbrances.

Why in politics and economics and not other domains?  Because these are social domains and and social solutions either are or involve incentives, and in social domains, incentives deracinate people, and people, when uprooted, behave more crassly - more like deterministic masses and less like romantic individuals.  That's why the problem of the romantic individual - in novels or in life - is the social trap.  A rooted person feels trapped.  And that's why the problem of the uprooted person (what we like to call a free person) is alienation.

anything goes

Last night I saw a big song and dance number, well done, big cast, great song, beautiful voices.  And tap dancing - this is a sound that doesn't survive reproduction.  It is thrilling, and the big number last night took up maybe 10 minutes - nearly overwhelming.  What a sound!  What excitement!  And all the more exciting for carrying no message whatever, but only physical happiness, shared by a house of people thrilling to it, thinking this is really something.  And I say - it was!  Hot damn!

speaker

The lawyer uses language to create or eliminate, to clarify or obscure.  Little else. (And what little else there is comes either as a consequence of the language work or else from being a trustable agent.)  But of course the agency is largely that of language itself, incarnate.  If the title were not already in use for a cousin position, we might well call a lawyers a Speaker.

a to a

There is something wonderful in the transformation of letters from cursive to print - to say nothing of the range of variations in each of those two means of fixing a letter onto a page.

apprentice

Excessive democracy is mere populism, and an evil equal to most other "mere" political structures.

seasonable

Even a well-meaning movement may be, on balance, destructive and negative, and generally is if it is not patiently developed.  A prematurely rampant force, even when virtuous, is not desirable.

great moments in long words

Wherewithal.

Bonneville

The soul of America has come to be Salt Lake City.  For a time.  For this time.  This troubles me less, and somehow heartens me more, than perhaps it ought.

a poor patch

How I miss hymns.  Not only to sing them, but to have that field of action for language.  Words, sentences, lost to me.  Entire expressive structures, lost.  Yearning, tender neediness and reliance, great reverence, adoration of mystery - all lost.  Without religion, even apart from the loss of faith, simply for lack of religion alone, I am lame, as the cost of being more true.

Nobody can have it all.  Even the poorer reaches of religious language is rich: I cannot hear Immortal, Invisible God, Only Wise, or I Need Thee Every Hour without feeling the loss.

look upon justice

I have extraordinary respect for American courts as repositories of significant and necessary powers, and as careful, able users of that power.

But I have no special respect for American courts as determiners of what is right, or even of what properly is to be determined given a textual authority.  In determinations, a court is only so much better than equally intellegent and disinterested men as practice and careful briefing by lawyers may make it.

The important thing is to understand that courts are more than determiners of outcomes - they do not just call balls and strikes.  They are repositories of awesome power over you, over me, overall.  And in that capacity, they are wonderfully effective and deserving of profound respect.

border patrol

There is such a thing as military skiing.

or?

From one perspective, the last near-two hundred years have been little the digestion, by human consciousness, of Darwin.  And from another, Darwin hardly matters.  That perspective can color-shift history so completely is telling.

elementary

A simple virtue of virtue is invulnerability to exposure.

"Look Upon Justice"

So some local parents I knew wanted me to talk to their son about college, now that he's a high school senior.  So we did and had a fine talk.  And I learned a thing or two.

Apparently at his catholic school if you don't stop reading whatever you're reading right at the end of reading period, you get in trouble. Well, when you get in trouble at this place, you are punished with a "Look Upon Justice" period, which is actually an hour standing in the chapel, silently staring at the crucified Christ.

He said, in his backturned baseball cap, mop-headed teenager way, "It kind of makes you hate Jesus."  I should think it would.

an Eamesian one

Among the qualities of virtue is its utility.  The virtuous man is simply better equipped to enter the field of action.  Some of that utility is obvious (such as a facility for quicker sorting) but other aspects of that utility are subtle.  For example, the virtuous warrior may at times seduce through virtue, or impel acquiescence through virtue, in settings where his force would not do.  I said this was an Eamesian one, but it might as well have been a Homeric one.  But the point cannot be stretched to far: a virtuous man is no match for a host of evil men, even if they are individually weak in other ways, too.

only kidding

You know how you get rewards points on credit cards.  I think you should get points every time you fill up your tank with gas.  Collect enough points and you get a free vacation to Abu Dhabi.

erg

Up to a point, the way to deal with the insistence and volume professional demands is to lean into them.  The work one chooses to make a profession of is not an imposition but part of one's true self.

unhesitating

The submission of all to medical orders is not only one of the true surprises of our culture, but also one of the best paths to understanding it.

ticket to ride

Some people have sex because it is the most fun they can have for free.

given the choice

I'd rather be damned if I didn't.

then and now

If the great mass of a people are tough and decent, that is enough.

grave

"'Dust thou art, to dust returnest'
Was not spoken of the soul."

proverbs

Nobody is more manipulable than the paranoid.  A trusting nature enables the canniest people.

Welles

It takes effort to attribute canniness to the wide-eyed.

socially

Am I a spider?  Not if there is no fly.  But even when there is, usually not.

evening

The social dance begins, with our erstwhile partners seated comfortably, ready for a show.

respect

The beauty of your friends results partly from a walling-off, by the friends and by you, of their trashiness.  That is, friends are not only an opportunity for opening up, but also should impel us to clean up, to be better because there are those nearby who esteem and care for us - and see in.

pleading

A court is a temple within which sits a judge, meant to hold the sword in one hand, and the book of law in the other.  One approaches with care.

Ford Mustang GT in the driveway

Much of what makes American bedevilments - cars, guns, suburbs - so difficult to deal with is that they are each, in their way, so very beautiful.

variety

Great lines from youtube: "I am a Space Pirate.  And this burrito's my gold."

frank and rose

It isn't enough to say that a commercial activity has no social benefit.  First because a socially neutral commercial activity is unobjectionable.  Second because one's proper suspicion that no commercial activity could be socially neutral suggests that the benefits, as much as the detriments, might be very subtle.  Third because social benefit is too vague a phrase.

A better attack along the same lines might be, for example: when banks become too proccupied with complex trading, they become simultaneously less effective at capital intermediation and more difficult for the managers of ends requiring intermediation to profitably engage.

fly

So, we'll be flying in the upper deck of a 747 later this year.  That's a lovely pleasure: it isn't often that the elegance of a craft is so localized, and we'll be flying in the elegance.  It'll be like flying inside Marilyn Monroe's beauty mark or Jimmy Stewart's stutter.

no fly

With misinformation as complete as this, there might just be some good going on.  But probably not.

experiment

How would the abortion debate change, and how would it stay the same, if humans laid eggs like reptiles and these needed: much tending? little tending? no tending?

chicken dinner

It is beautiful to watch people work to make a social connection over drinks and dinner - the hive of tools and moves and responses, swarming to a common purpose, with elegance seen and charm felt.

Damascus Rd.

A sincere and peaceful religious faith is a crown of glory upon the common man but a millstone about the neck of the great.

geography lesson

Brooklyn and Queens are adjacent, but each is closer to Manhattan than to the other.

throne

It is difficult, without the facilities of organized religion, to carry off a dignified recognition of a common person.  And with it, quite easy.

simple

No surprise here: The worst and commonest way to lack time is to take too many breaks.

gone

She liked one Chick-Fil-A in particular.  She said they used the least seasoning.

legitimacy

A flash mob is not necessarily the people.  But neither is the same population, in its quietness the day before, the people...necessarily.  One does not want any people to understand too well what "the people" is.

oil

Wealth exists along a spectrum between husbanded produce, at one extreme, and extracted loot, on the other.  There is a moral polarity to the spectrum, the one indicated by these labels for the poles, but as usual the morality of any particular wealthiness is only lightly implied by its individual place along the spectrum.

At the productive side of the spectrum, there is as much wealth as there is labor.  It is infinite in resource, bounded by time, but multipliable by methods and machines, or better materials, or more men.  Any of these enhancements press it down the scale towards extraction.

At the extractive side of the spectrum, there is (only) as much wealth as is found.  It is finite (though huge) in resource, but unbounded by time.  Thus, in the perception of time-bound creatures such as ourselves, it may be effectively concentrated: piled up for a few years, but this will be no matter to a person who is concerned only with his own few years.

The habits of husbandry and the habits of extraction are largely, not entirely, contrary.  But they are not contradictory, and the complete person has the essential habits of both, and can both take (planning, selection, orchestration) and make (craft, fit, patience, finish).

knowlessge

One wishes some truths had never seen the light of day: the power of "heightening the differences", for example.  I know a couple that haven't gotten out, to my knowledge, and I'll keep them that way.

sober

We live in time, but in the strangest way: we are each, as it were, a snake upon a rock, a snake able to wriggle in space but basically placed along the axis of time, bound at its top and bottom at the time and place of its birth and death.  Able to move, but mostly in the middle, like a guitar string or clothes line might move in its middle, but is tied down at the ends.  The snake, though, moves by its own motivation.  That is how we are.

Strange enough, but here is the strangest bit, this snake's head travels through the snake, from tail to front, and this is felt by the snake as the passage of time.  And the movement of the snake's body occurs in the region through which the head is passing.

To identify with the sections of one's self that one has not yet reached, is needful and difficult to each of us.  One who can do so well may be wise.  One who cannot do so is little more than an animal.

next

Spending, and only spending, finally validates the possession of money.  The value of money is in security against contingency, but the realization of that value is in what is bought. 

I mean that as a familiar example of delayed validation, and its importance.  I am more thinking of global warming, or growing populations, or peak oil.  Acting on something whose validation is delayed is something few can handle, but fortunately a few can handle it, on behalf of the many: for actions (such as saving) on the basis of delayed validation requires trust (the basis of money), which is a form of openness, on the basis of hedging against contingency, which is a form of carefulness or closedness.  The right weave of these two is the thing, then - and law, finance and science are the looms.

all the modern inconveniences

Hug the acquisitive.  Possession is hard work that receives no praise and gives little pleasure.

see

Call it a home-team advantage, or a consequence of the brain's visual processing facilities, or an embedded procreative urge, or whatever you will.  But here's a question that shouldn't be answerable, but is:  What is most beautiful to behold?  Beautiful people. 

ideas

Out in the woods?  No way - what would I do with the money in my pocket?

l'escalier

Not Epcot, but Watson is the true heir to the World's Fairs.

beloved

The human willingness to risk brokenheartedness in pursuit of another's friendship or love is one of our most interesting traits.  This willingness bears so much of what is pathetic, but also occasionally what may be noble, or else beautiful, about our race.  And the brokenheartedness itself?  That is rarely pathetic and never directly noble, but usually beautiful, albeit painfully so.

rose

We are built with the capacity to fight.  More even than most capacities, that calls for careful cultivation.  Nothing is worse left in its natural state, and little is more pitiably wasted when simply cut down.

R and his master

No character in R's life's story comes off so badly as the one R worshipped and served. R served in one of his master's many country houses, and in eighty years, the master never stopped by.  The pain of this was the mighty secret to R's unique connection to the wives of faithless husbands.  They and he shared a pain, the pain of abandonment.

The better I knew R, growing up, the more I understood him, the more I knew that this was the trouble for R - that he served an absent master.  R needed only a divine glance, a divine whisper, and he could have taken sustenance from that instant to last him his life long.  But there was no sign.  I used to pray for a sign, not for me, but for R.  I believe this prayer of mine, a prayer over years, was never answered.

My life changed in a series of conversations with R, years ago.  Twice in those conversations, R told me of a moment, in his own old battles to keep faith, when he had decided that he "had figured it out - God loves me, but he doesn't like me."  That is wit, and R had a beautiful wit, but this - this was wit from the depths of pain, the pain of an intelligent and beautiful victim of a divine cruelty. 

"God loves me, but he doesn't like me."  One way or the other, R could only be half right, and that was his tragedy.

W

To be an individual is to be misunderstood, and to be a leading individual is to be misunderstood widely.  For understanding glides along paths paved with belonging.  And to belong is to conform, somehow or another.

To be an individual is, then, is partly to starve for want of others.  But to belong is to drown in others, as ice drowns in water.  Neither the mountaintop nor the sea is good for us - we must live in town.

But there, we must have rooms, apartments with doors that shut.  We must structure ourselves, careful above all to cohere, but to differentiate ourselves into the parts whose individuation matter, then associate in the ways for which belonging is no fatal loss.  (This is the mighty secret of church music, and even in some degree of popular music - it has a strength apart from any excellence as music, being music that binds.)

And then, if we have the talent for it – and this was W– R–'s great talent – we bring others into solitary conversation, and weave the scrim of privacy through which soulful, individual revelations may be shown and known, known as intelligence knows itself to be: the congellation of spirit.

Oh, but hide not your light under a bushel, if light you have!  This was R's great failing, and he knew it, and he spent his life trying to repair it, but ineffectually because the paths to earthly mountaintops were repellent to him.  He tried instead to make his own mountain, but he was not tectonic, he was spiritual.

No candle, by burning, ever raises itself up, but only, slowly, burns itself, down.

fees

Lincoln was an attorney, as everyone knows, and a fine one, as most do.  He was also a great man.  So to read his legal correspondence is really a delight.  He is so clear about where is own interests lie, and about what interests him, as a legal thinker, even as he keeps his clients' interests primary.  One lesson: it is false and foolish to act as if you are not interested in good fees and interesting cases.  It is better to frankly admit where your interests (financial and intellectual) lie, then go on to conduct business fairly, having equipped others to verify that you have done so. 

There are many advantages to this practice: First, modesty: a lawyer is a professional, but also in the business of getting business from businessmen, who will appreciate your not pretending to be above the fray.  Second, reputation: if you help people see where your interests lie, then you go on to act justly and evenly, regardless ofe your interests, they will find it easier to see your integrity, and esteem you for it.  Third, evident strength: stating your own interests plainly is the better part of standing up for yourself, and a lawyer who stands up for his own interests is the better choice to stand for the interests of his clients, too.  Last, opportunity: it will sometimes cost others nothing to advance your interests, even when you didn't know they could: if they are well-disposed, they will advance you in ways that you, not knowing all the circumstances, could not have arranged for yourself.

next

Although it does become easier to be happy as one ages, and even as one grows in strength and ability, so does age discover, year on year, a creeping deadness within.  Regions, once alive, taut and red with life turn, over time, pithy, parched and grey.

καταπληκτική ενέργεια

I'm getting to the point where I am, at times, actually practicing law: actually being a lawyer.

Watson can't

Mastery of a subject is a great source of pleasure, and would not be if it were an end.  It is not; a subject once mastered is a means to use and reflection.

chateau

The logic of trade is not the logic of production or service.  Market price is not based on optimal productive conditions, nor on the best conditions for the service provider.  That which is not a commodity should not be priced solely on market terms.

catalytic

It is a commonplace that it gets easier to be happier as one gets older, up to a point and barring afflictions.  And I find this is true.  I am as happy now as I was in college.  There, then, a correspondence of place and personality, of individual needs and communal abundance, made for a very rich situation.  I flourished, but under full sun, well watered and in ideal soil.  Happiness was nearly pushed on me in quantity then and there: it would have been hard not to be happy, and I didn't try.

And now?  I am as happy, but on far less.  I have become able to break down the components of rocky soil, and steal the nutrients that were locked up.  I take great pleasure in law, for example, and law is rocky soil - it has to be worked on before it opens up.

But you're married you say - isn't that a difference? Of course it is, and that is what I was heading towards.  Marriage is a mutual arrangement for deriving various goods - including happiness - from less than ideal circumstances.  Marriage, in other words, is not a raw input, but a mutual process by which two work upon and build from the raw materials of experience, of life.  We are not hydroponic tomatoes in a greenhouse with fertilized water dripping on us.*  We have to do the work of getting nutrition and living upon and producing from it.  Marriage is not the tree, or the forest, or the fruit: marriage is photosynthesis or digestion.  In this way, marriage is more nearly like one's productive reading and writing - it is not a thing so much as an ongoing parade of action, or if a thing, it is a route or - better - a facility considered together with its action.  Marriage, like a serious course of reading, is a faculty.

The happiness of age is the happiness of marriage is the happiness of - arrangement and matured digestive capacity at work.



* Well, some people - sufficiently wealthy Manhattanites and sufficiently ascetic nuns, for example - are pretty much hydroponic, and the results can be strangely good, just as hydroponic vegetables can be good.  But one does notice that the external system has taken over much of the internal work.

touchy

One wants the familiar boss, not new bosses.

whose and what within

The mind, as if wound with a key, works hard upon the sight of a beautiful, precious little box.  Unless opened.

deep thought

Year 2050: Jersey Shore reunion.

nile

A people are like a person in that they are either asleep or awake.  The difference is that a person is asleep or awake, simply.  But a people are, at any moment, asleep to some things, but awake to others.  And these are like many tides superimposed, as if one sea was of oil and water, and each ebbed and flowed to its own moon.

size

As a practical matter, I try to avoid writing things that are long and technical.  Still, it is lovely to be able to deliver something longer and more precise than anything I've written before.  I think to myself: See there? I can do that!

da capo

One of the benefits of a little looking around for alternatives is that it recasts what one has as a choice, rather than mere a mere given or context.  And this can make holding and keeping and continuing a happier prospect (unless, of course, what one has isn't so good).

how'd?

I'm awed (but at what?) when I think of those things in my life that a believer would call blessings and anyone would call very luckily timed transitions or avoidances.  There are so many of them and they have just as much to do with any good results as all my efforts.

• I bought a house that would have anchored me, and which I could not have sold, a month after I did, except at a steep loss.
• The job that I took when I moved paid like it never had before, and never would again, and I left it a year before it was moved to the boonies.
• I finished law school in the last year that enjoyed the crest of boomtime recruiting.
• My interests, during the peak of the economy, were in countercyclical areas, such that I was well placed by the time I graduated.

And so forth - I've all the best ones out.  What to make of these, I sometimes cannot help but...wonder.

Rosie

Reason is the rivet of our fast-building age.

thickly

In our darker moments, all our actions seem afflictions, and our comforts, all coffins.

fray

In business, as in life more generally, a person wants certain kinds of action.  Generally, the real action is costly, not monetarily (or merely so) but personally.  That is: You want to be in the thick of it?  You'll have to sacrifice mightily.

bad weather

I work on the 42nd floor. A great chunk of ice, my size - broken off from our building I suppose - rushed down past my window just now.  I hope it broke into bits before it reached the sidewalk.

he means

One needs representatives, but having deputized them and sent them into court, or before cameras, or down the hall to speak for you - one shudders.

confession

I require certain kinds of projects in order to be myself.

blessed purchase

People prefer a deal to saving an amount of equal value.  This is true even in the limit case: people prefer an apparent deal of no value over saving an amount of some small value.

Of course, I'm concealing a telling idiom:  we usually wouldn't say "people prefer a deal"; we'd usually say "people prefer getting a deal".

And that's the clue to half the explanation: people register a deal as received, as an offer accepted.  The other half is that a deal accompanies a purchase - a wanted thing.

multifoliate rose

One looks at these beautifully colorized Hubble photographs and thinks, somehow, of Dante's Paradiso.  Without the universal symmetry, of course.

an easy one

(Read this one instead.)

I could talk to you about Durham Cathedral, Jersey Shore, or section 328 of the Bankruptcy Code.  For an hour - on any one.  Or all day, although I'd be more likely to do that if I was putting off writing.

What kind of person does this make me?  Probably not a good one, or an important one, or a powerful one.

a worky, wonky one

(Really, don't read this.  I'm talking to myself.)

Bankruptcy law is exciting on several levels.  The most important level will always be its indirect benefits (on distress that does not lead to bankruptcy) followed in importance by its most salient level, its direct benefits (on bankrupt entities and their economic and other relations).

But another level on which it is, frankly, entrancing, is the conceptual level.  So much gets done with a few powerful, universal and abstract moves: perimeter definition (estate), present valuation (estimation), priority (priority), translation (classification and voting).

All this in the service of as pristine an example of values-in-tension as I know: a single pair: Creditor Rights and Debtor Preservation.  Each fully occupies its corner of the field (creditor rights in corporate liquidations, debtor preservation in individual and family bankruptcies).  Both are at their most interesting in the middle of the field, where corporate reorganizations occur.

And bankruptcy is exciting on many other levels.  Just a few: Bankruptcy is an arena in which you can tease out, better than most anywhere else, what law really is, distinct from force, interest, convention, wisdom or public spritedness.  Bankruptcy is simply the most productive and delightful use (abuse), by legal process, of judicial structure yet devised, indeed the most remarkable deconstruction of judicial process probably devisiable, given a constraint of real-world sustainability and utility.  Bankruptcy, in its modern form, is simply the most modern but fundamental single work of coherent legal construction - that is, the most extraordinary code of general application - yet written.  It is simply a towering achievement of human linguistic construction, among the cathedrals of law, it does not soar like Chartres, it sits, heavy with the spirit of need, like Durham upon its promontory.

I could go on.  But I'll just add two more: bankruptcy is fun for the aficionado because it hides in plain sight, uninteresting to most people even though its attractions are so obvious, which is precisely how an esotericist or aficionado likes it best.  And, finally, bankruptcy is about complex failures and how to respond to them - and there's little more humane, human, actually interesting than that.

tutti

National anthems, both lyrics and tunes, tend to fail unless placed somewhere outside the main anthemic registers.  The French and American anthems are good examples of eccentric successes.  The Australian anthem is more unusual - it registers as a full throated anthem, right down the line...and succeeds:

Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil...

Beautiful lines.

aerate

Spatially speaking, the dense, central parts of this city would be much poorer if it were not pocketed with churches, or even if these were replaced with parks.

today

A young person is honored and pleased by the forms of equality offered by the elders.  It is not necessary, not even desirable, that the equality be meant or mistaken - only that it be offered in form.

more Qohelet

The most common - and thus most life-sparing and guiding - form of hope cannot survive much reading or reflection. Another hope may come in its place, a sort of yeast-like wonder that rises within all the words and accumulated sense of past.  This is a better hope, considered in itself, but it can never be a light to the common foot and path.  The considered wonder has its use, though, in its shaping - usually not intended - of those more common, workaday hopes, and in its mitigation against too-savvy manipulations of those hopes.

elite

Hard work inflames a sense of deserving reward, and that is a sense without proportion.  And from this: blindness.

scribble

I never did like homework, but I probably would have reconciled my young self to it better if I had been told - gently - that I'd be doing homework all my life.

yearn

It is well to remember that if we are not in bondage, it is by some deliverance - perhaps old - and neither because we were always free nor ever because we are inevitably so.

the healer

Bankruptcy law alternates between interventions to resolve natural but damaging snarls and an effort to get out of the way of the inevitable.

crosswalk

Let no man deny the visual - a starving mind could subsist on fleeting glances.

charity

It is good for us to love the weak, not for their weakness, but for their being among us.

Genesis 3

A hard chapter from which to draw directly any usable lesson - one is pressed to step back and say something general about the profound human need for explanation, for a sense of whodunit.  Useful reflections on good and evil require a departure from, rather than reflections upon, this chapter.  That's quite unusual when dealing with scriptural passages on good and evil - when these are the subject there are nearly always nuggets and delights and lessons.  Instead, we have here a chapter of interest mainly for its mythologies, for recovery of old tropes, forms, images - a flaming sword barring the tree of life - many probably irrecoverable to the critical reader.  But these interests come from just how unreconstructed the passage appears, the very thing that - probably - deprives it of much meaning for the reader as such.

All in all, the chapter is one of those rare, intractable low points in the scriptures, considered as a book for reflective reading.

well

It's hard not to cast your pearls before swine when all you've got are pearls and you have a thing for pork.

on the N

And now, week on week, I see more hipsters in Astoria.  His and hers hipsters, sitting on the N train, he knitting a scarf in the drab colors of desert fatigues, she listening, through her cap - same color - to music from her headphones with a pink skull on them.  Lonely 30-something girl hipsters, tapping keys on cell phones with stickers on the back.  Lonely dude hipsters, straight but twee and blinking back ironic tears, waiting for the train to take him to....  My God, where do they work?

Who are they?  Why are they in my neighborhood?  These are Hard Questions.  But perhaps I can deduce the unknown from the known.  The known: where are they from?  This we know.  They are From Brooklyn.  A very particular part of Brooklyn.  Perhaps that's all I need to deduce why they are here - Brooklyn rejected them.  These are the offscourings of Brooklyn, redeemed to credible identity as hipsters only by exclusion from their peers, against whom these were too bright, too sunnily ordinary.  Excluded by their Brooklyn peers, who saw in them, not what we see in them, but what they see in us.

Ah well, live and let live, I say.  Welcome, failed hipsters!  But, just you turn Neptune Diner ironic - just you even try - and I'll steal your yarn, ball to skein.

mta

The city writhes with silver snakes,
A pulse of sliding steel
That carries men within its veins,
And sings with brake and wheel.

The song it cries is known,
The path it takes is set:
An orrery of snakes,
A firmament below

That shines through grates
And rattles through
An unseen zodiac.

No man sees cause
But only need
To step and swipe and
Flee.

downward

Language, and plenty else, devolves without a sufficient degree of regnant snobbery: gatekeeping, and influential webs that require care by members, if they are to remain attached.  But we (I don't mean our country, I mean a larger, transnational we) are not tolerant of gatekeeping, and have less and less of it: classiness and care, excellence and effort, become merely individual qualities, even little more than traits or quirks.  What is left is viewpoint, bottom line, or hard affiliation.  This is the gloomy takeaway, anyhow.

dorothy

We encounter strangers, as places, with a zest for the new, but confirming our preference for the familiar.

grace

Language particularly, and our other constructive capacities, create the space for worlds beyond what is physically at hand or buildable.  These are the regions of religion, love, fantasy.  And they are as treacherous, yet potentially more glorious, than anything earthly.  It is in this sense, too, that man, made crooked, can never be straightened.  We will ever bend away from our actualities, and in so doing, affect - but not quite inevitably impoverish - the actual world, and our lives within in.

The actual world of practicalities, observed realities and work is a world with little room for grace, or even the rudiments of grace.  And I know the damage done by living very much in the imaginative realms in which grace may appear.  And still - I would not cut from man the ability to feel grace.

child

A friendship may be wide ranging or not - and from this breadth its quality cannot be assumed.  But the broader the friendship, the greater its goodness depends on the quality of the individuals.

yelp

Venturesome trust gains more than it loses. But those losses bite.

just to pinch the loaf of that thought

The rationalist sits athrone and stirs a regal rod into the lapping flow of nonsense, feeling, and poor thought beneath. Reason feels aright with itself, secretly offers thanks for this blessed sea of watery enemies. But then comes the empiricist, in his imperial craft astride the sea, borne by it yet not of it - and the rationalist shakes in fear, from crown to boots.

AA

Is there anything more tedious, but in glints and shards more sweetly aglow, than the reformed sinner?

no end

If you do not wish, now and then, that you could not read, you are not reading enough.

diluvian

What a mess we'd made of an extra 50 years.

buddy

We do not want our friends to be too impressive.

congressmen

A significant portion, probably not most, but much, of seemingly trite or populist political thought is actually substance, encoded. The subterranean message most often regards power, which our overt political discourse can barely see - let alone work with.

stab

The transition from youth to middle age is partly a transition from being considered for what you may be to being known for what you have done. And, at least for the ordinarily good person, this is a double step down, and is painfully felt.

First, one begins to see one's self in the past, and to be seen in the past. Second, one is no longer seen in expansive and optimistic potential, but critically known by a selective sheaf of actualities.

hunger

A person without needs is apt to be useless. Neediness is weakness; a need is a weakness: yes and yes. But what strength needs is application, and application follows need.

sounds

Bumptious. One of those words that is strangely meta-onomonopoetic: having the sound of what a soundless thing might sound like.

a better way

Self control is among those foundational human qualities. Those with it may not amount to anything good, but those without it never do. And it is one of those qualities which need not be moderated: a person can be too reserved, but one can never be too self controlled. Indeed, an excess of reserve is best resolved by an excercise of self control.

(And do I have much of it? No, alas.)

trivium

The less a person appreciates that music and math are within language, as constituent structures, the more that person is susceptible to one who does know it.

Davila

We want to be liked. We want to be honored. And of course these are contrary.

power

We are animal, but only partly. It is exactly, but only, to that extent that might makes right. But right may arrange might, and quite capture it - this is the conquest and dominion that is felt as an honorable peace.

Genesis 2

Note the central but contrary role of water in this and the prior account. In this story, the earth is watered and flourishes. In the prior story, the water recedes and the earth is revealed. The first, a story of placement, the second, a story of conditions. Parataxis; syntaxis.