Key

A little more than half of the people I know who have read much philosophy are worse off rather than better off for having done so.  But the real condemnation is this: the worse off are only a few more than half, and they are only a little worse off - philosophy appears to be not only not very good for people, but not even very dangerous.  In most, it is a slight ailment.  And in the few for whom it is more - in either direction - the excess likely lies with them.  I speak of the readers, not the writers.

according to JK Rowling

You can't have sex near unicorns.  It's tacky.

Suu Kyi

What doesn't come across so well in a video, or at all when she speaks in English, is the love and lightness with which Aung San Suu Kyi communicates with her Burmese people.  She knows how to wrap an audience around her finger, but honor them as she does so, by high regard and a kind of giving of herself.  The reserve of her English-speaking style is reversed when she speaks Burmese.  All is serious, honest, even highbrow, yet there is a sense of play, of joy, of peaceful strength flowing to the people.  She can answer a serious question with stories that build through crescendos of laughter.  Some anecdotes, many folk takes.

Idiomatic Burmese is especially a matter of constant allusions to a common font of folk tales and proverbs.  Suu Kyi pushes this further by not only alluding to these proverbs and tales as static cultural references, but diving in and adjusting them, making them funnier, fresher, and more pointed.  The effect on a Burmese audience is when she does this to transfix them.  It is as if she has taken the cultural furniture familiar to all and made it come gently but definitely to life.

This would be offensive if she misappropriated the proverbs, or indeed if she wasn't so much held in awe.  But because she is held in awe, and because she does do it gently, her breathing of life into these cultural proverbs and tales works.  That is one of the ways - only one, but what a way - in which she has come to embody the Burmese people.  She breathes life into the shared cultural heritage and by means of it drives home points of responsibility and hope for the future, of shared purpose and recognition of need.  It is the glory of folk tales and proverbs to be so used.

There is something of Lincoln in all this.  Why hadn't I seen that before?  Is it because I could not imagine anyone even comparing with Lincoln?  Because so much of his place in my mind is defined by his peculiarity, his glorious strangeness?  Probably, but she does compare.  (Rather as Mandela always recalled Washington to me.)

Her pitch for non-militaristic, non-violent change (in Burmese) was her own take on the means/end trope.  Said she: the means define the end.

(She also has that mystical quality that comes of her long house arrest and release.  Assassinated political leaders become martyrs, political saints.  But are dead.  Her arrest gave her some of that - in this case deserved - halo, but left her alive.  She has something of the resurrection about her.  It is almost too much.  You can see why the Tatmadaw feared her, and how, in fearing either to release or to kill her, they made her more fearsome.  What a demon she would be if devoted to political evil and not to good!)

days

Familiar love is felt most tenderly at departure.

Bishop's storehouse

A welfare system is most readily premised on fellow feeling, or family feeling, or religious feeling.  An extensive state is a welfare state only by ideology or necessity.  Generally speaking.

recess

I often joke that people will never be as impressed with me, nor like me, so much as they do at the start.  I find that often true.  Of myself to others, and particularly of others, to me.  But this is not a decrease to zero - only to a happy moderate level, where love might grow, or not.

Adams

There's something wonderful - albeit aspirational - about John Adams insisting that the government of Massachusetts be constituted as and named a commonwealth.  This is what the government was to be: neither a libertarian gossamer thread confederation, nor yet a ideologically tinged republic.  And especially not a state: that heavy word.  Of all these words, of all these ideas, commonwealth suggests an organic and inseparable expression of us: the river of the people's intent and action.

eat not

Consumption becomes consumptive when it is not directed.  The liberated (that is, self-directing) person consumes for ends beyond adhesion to what is pressed on him or her in the marketplace.  And thus that liberated person directs the economy through their consumption.  But when consumption is not externally directed but a compulsion, the openness is driven from the structure, which compacts into an animal - or nearly plantlike - knot of illiberal instinct.

seen through her eyes

One kind of love is a tenacious innocence.

nosin

One of the difficulties of an egalitarian, democratic culture is that it obscures the value of different virtues for different situations - different stations, to use that word with its older connotations.  There are times and places - but I more mean roles in life - for which self love, or aggression, or restlessness - are virtues.  And in which humility, or acceptance, or quietness are virtues - or vices.

cliches

Great realities may grow from mustard seeds, but that which was tiny had never been not nil.  Nothing comes of nothing.

hundred million

Simple things, places, homes - these can look good with little trouble.  Lively, clean, intelligent - little more is required.  But expense looks well only with great trouble and greater taste.  I'd bet the truly beautiful interiors among great Manhattan penthouses and townhouses could be counted on your fingers and toes.

stasis

Part of adulthood is how one deals with the simple social vices: drinking, gambling, smoking, gossiping, etc.  A iron-sided giant, I suppose, avoids them all.  A lucky person perhaps finds none of them appealing.  But for most of us, the ordinary and sufficient path is maintenance.  To continue to avoid most of these vices - those that never appealed much in the first place.  And if one or two have their hooks in us, to moderate them in quantity and effect.  And then to take pleasure in that moderated remainder - that we not seek pleasure elsewhere.  To keep them trimmed back and then take what one can from them.

Porgy and Bess

My cab driver this morning is an old opera singer - he toured with Porgy and Bess as "Robbins" for years.  We talked about shape note singing and Bach, chromatic temper, and the best cheap seats at Carnegie.  He sang for me a little "Woman is a Sometime Thing."  We were a joy to each other and the ride was too short.