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.