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.