allonge

Work mutes thought.

founding deists

An adult who believes in Noah's Ark and its story as flat, historical fact is a simpleton, at least in that regard: the quality of the simpleton's lawyering or blacksmithing or parenting need not be questioned.

But this is not the person around which to build a society that needs soundness of intellect at its base. There probably never was such a society, nor need of one. But show me a people who understand the value and beauty - the glory and the cruelty - of the Ark, the dove, the grapevine. Show me them, untainted by credulity, and I will show you a rock on which a nation may be built.

c-suite

Make no mistake. Not irrationality, but arationality, has driven reason and life as steam drives pistons. 

a return to Burma in view

Places and scenes; friends and family.

effective

There's more to the power of computers than speed. One major contribution: clarity on cause, achieved by a controlled environment with limited permitted responses. When the impermissible is impossible, we can trace backward and forward, slickly. The old Spartan solution, perfected.

the meaningful future

Only what is contingent is meaningfully future, and only what is contingent on us (singular or plural, as the stance may be) is personally future, meaningfully. The rest of the future, and all of the present, is effectively past.

what is man, though

I was asking myself on the way home from work one of those great Scriptural questions: What is wisdom?  And to my surprise, I find the question answerable, at least in the definitional way of answering.

Wisdom - by which I mean the kind of wisdom that is the subject of the wisdom literature - is the way of careful attentiveness that does not impede productivity.

How to get wise; and if one can; and how to transmit wisdom; and wisdom's domain and limits: these are all questions that such a definition does not address.  But I'm reasonably sure that most people who get wise do so by practicing and surrounding themselves with others who do and by controlling impulses. And that the answer to how wisdom is transmitted is inside that answer of the getting: wisdom is transmitted much as other kinds of strength are transmitted, and to similar extent. That the domain and limits of wisdom are in form those of other forms of strength as well. 

I can say that if the God of the Bible is as portrayed, that Godliness would be the cornerstone of such wisdom. And if not, then not. 

Sunday

Sacred never did mean inviolable.  Sacredness long anticipated the violation, and through the violation, to restoration.  And it is this anticipation through that transcends and sanctifies, falsely or truly.  In one way or another, we all think through the event of death to more, or else devalue individual life.  The latter is a real option, and in some configurations even a respectable one.  But we more often think through to an afterlife, another life, or - more rarely when more than vaguely - a convergence back into the bloodstream of family, state or human history or the path of all life, or something of cosmos.  It is not the impossible correctness but the imperfect effectiveness of all this that may awe us.  And it is one of the arrows of time.  One can reason backwards and forwards in time.  But faith runs only forwards, either towards the future or towards the unknown past, which is a kind of future.

camp fire glory

The old, British television version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a laconic delight from first to last. It is constantly exciting by doing what's supposedly dull. Exposition isn't merely that when the storytelling is so eager, the tales so bold. And the fine actors rise to the challenge of these long passages, relishing the room to unfurl their talent and beckon us in. And in the midst, a glory. Beryl Reid's Connie Sachs. The weeping, comic savant, the alcoholic, lonely lover of "her lovely boys."  Even opposite Alec Guiness's best, she glints with asymmetric tears that shine like the facets of the kind of diamond that we name and think cursed. 

Sans Souci

All these neighborhoods and apartment buildings named Sans Souci. One of those true beauties anchored in the constancy of its opposite. 

seen

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and even more in the collective eyes of a group that settles on ways and kinds of beauty.  The flower, if it felt, would not feel beautiful, but rushed, desperate, exposed to danger and stuck.

thin

I do not think that money is a creature of law.  But I do think that money, that engine of abstraction, is  controlled by law in the way that valves control a steam engine.  Law does not provide the heat, nor the steam, nor is it at the piston of production.  But none of this would cohere into something as (relatively) tight and (relatively) stable and (altogether) ordered as a steam engine without the valves, nor would wealth cohere into so an economy as this without law.  Of course, steam sees valves as interference.

flood

We mourn wasted potential, but this is usually a proxy for something more deserving of our mourning, such as useless inequity. 

Wasted potential, in itself, is no more to be mourned than the universal fact of mortality. Imagine a world in which potential was not wasted. Impossible!  Or if possible, stupefying in its badness.  From this we may rightly pray for relief, as from too much rain. 

dub thee

A college or university of great name shifts where a young person is from.  And this - an timely second chance and translation - well, who can blame students and parents for leaping crazily at that.

Screwtape

There's no doubt the road to hell is wide, with sections variously paved and unimproved, to suit all tastes.  And still many hack through the bramble and brush to get there.  The work that people put into their degradation!  The look on the face of the self-ruined is sometimes a look of Falstaffian, florid ecstasy.  But it is more often the look of the haggard, the exhausted, the laborer.

yer

Language and politeness overlap.  Some languages are so formally open that they reveal their specific  nature only in the effort to be a good conversational guest.  And most languages are comprehensible even if spoken brutally, or brokenly, which are the same except in intent.  And by politely I do not mean formally, as the starchy tone of many of the worst internet comments make clear.

Speakers who turn quickly to profanity, or offense, wire themselves into toggle switches when they'd do better on a rheostat.  (Of course it is no good to mistake politeness for being permanently set to slight, or dim, or barely.)

cravat

Function sometimes functions as a pretext for fancy. We wear a brightly colored tie or a watch because we wish to wear a great gem or plume but do not dare. 

text neutrality

Free speech risks cheapened speech. I would rather have books risk the torch of fear, to be spared by reason, than saved by disinterest.  Oppression is a shortcut to esteem of the truth. 

Gallery 734 of the Met

The Shakers worshipped in the simplicity of work, the celibate equality of male and female, and the ecstasy of form, their world an eternal classroom in which the whole of all retreats into millennial contemplation.  The lion having lain beside the lamb, the animal and sensual takes leave, and the celestial, the rational, and the humane are withal.

If I owned a home, I'd want its public rooms crowned with Shaker peg board, from which chairs could depend, beside a mirror and lamp.  But there would have to be life beneath.  A place where a cat could be, and the Shakers would never have kept a cat in these rooms, but only in their swept barns.

The walls of white, the drawers built in, the backs of chairs as straight as the projecting flue of the stove, itself low on its haunches and compact as a black piglet.  And nearby, ready to draw its warmth, a rocking chair with two-stepped stool, the better for propping a book on my knee or yours.  We'd sit silently, but together, and think the tunes of hymns, unsingably glorious.

Zwingli would have smiled to see those white walls, those silent saints, and thought of his own stripped church interiors in Amsterdam.  But then he'd hear the preaching of Sister Ann Lee, and blanch.

The bed is on wheels that do not pivot: it rolls only for ease of cleaning, not to be rearranged.  It is in its place, over floorboards of scrubbed maple.

The spools of thread adorn a crown of work, noble in wait, as pure spun as the three legs of the table beside, whose curves are so pure that they seem to descend beneath a buoyant top, like the tendrils of a jellyfish: in their form they reach down, rather than sustain over gravity, as do the four fine land-living legs holding up the crown of spools.

fusilier and sailor

Luck, chance and fortune encourage virtue when they are capricious but do not shift randomly by the moment. Fortunately they are more often winds than static, and they are indirectly the measure of virtue: the virtues are those ways by which we sail with or against the winds of fortune. The vices, on balance, are the virtues of chaos.  Where there is regnant evil, chaos has been. Where the underlying entropic forces have given way to a more patterned fortune, virtue climbs slowly to the throne. 

after Bierce

Lottery: state-administered financial homeopathy.

Gallery 642 of the Met

Birds in every frame…a man-faced owl reading from a great book propped upon a lectionary of imps’ spines…Japanese tourists with a guidebook that steers one after another to a Flemish triptych…Christ in the corners, relegated…a flattish hand of golden grain pointing to its fellow grainy hand behind the trees…a convergence of showy brushwork in white, rendering sunrays, water flow, water spray and water fowl.

This square gallery has just six works, all Flemish, and the effect of their fewness is to emphasize them. Two especially: a triptych of perfunctory figures in the foreground who occasion the happy, deep backgrounds of fields and towns behind them, and a harvest time scene of grain and field hands, some working, some eating. But it is a third – which must share both a wall and a corner – that finally arrests, by its technical showmanship with a little white paint.

The harvest scene is as golden as grain in Autumn light, which it portrays. The ears of wheat are convincingly even, as flat as the tops of mature grain fields in truth, reaching over a low hill, where the scythe has narrowed what remains standing to a single row. This row points like a finger to the stand of trees that half-obscure the scene beyond: another hand-like, half-harvested field, itself nearer the town and the steeple of the church, almost obscured. The church, indeed, is hardly in this scene, secular despite its time (around 1600). Instead we have the resting field hands, one carving off a crescent-rind of bread, finishing the work begun with the curving scythe not twenty paces away. If there is falseness, it is in rhyme: the people are as flat as the tops of the grain, or slices of crusty, round loaves. That and the oxcart in the middle distance, laden with sheaves, looks as if it were instead carrying a giant square loaf, a sort of Weinermobile of bread. It is a generous scene, convivial and prosperous, pacific and suburban, well fed and flat in the foreground, but with the town itself still there, behind the stand of trees, and the shore village beyond. It knows that there is more than wheat and fields, beer and bread, hillocks and farm ponds, but feels content where it is, and when it is.

Let the triptych be, with its self-sure composition, its Γ of blue, the Galilee as nearly vertical on the left as the mountain-sea horizon is horizontal along the top.

Let the hellscape be, with its angular composition, Christ emanating weirdly from a rock at the vertex, with a lower arm of Biblical figures, from Adam and Eve through Noah to whoever, and an upper arm of fiery and volcanic highlights. And the man-faced owl, reading from a book, hardly noticing the big owl facing Christ, opposite.

Let the woodland road scene be, a Flemish market-day must be over the ridge, or behind the viewer; it is a secular pilgrimage, one woman carrying a basket in one hand, scratching her butt with the other.

Let the fantastic road scene be, with the Christian story (again!) relegated to a corner, and really about the wiggly roads of chalky pastel. Roads that run like hot icing off a Bundt cake.

And turn to the landscape of de Keuninck. It is almost two paintings, split by the middle. But the brighter, wide open left mainly serves to play with color – its greenish turquoise of mountain ranges – and to supply the sunlight, whose rays, in razor lines of thin, white paint, reach into the darker, heavier left. This is the side that drives the painting, and like the black velvet of a jeweler’s case, its darkness is there to set off the flashes of white paint.

There are rays of sun, in thin, dry, straight strokes of white, which the whole composition has permitted – not realistically but effectively and at once – to be as defined as crepuscular rays through trees, yet as open as sunbeams in an open field. It is the sort of sunray that might shine down on Mary, but there is nothing religious in this painting, so the ray is left as if it could exist in nature. And then there is the thin – but more opaque – white of the waterfall, which leaps down into something really gaudy. The painter has flecked the canvas with tiny spots of white paint to suggest the spray of the water as the fall hits an unseen pool. And in this spray, a fleeting white bird or quick strokes, wonderfully suggesting flight, and a brooding black bird, formed as much from the absence of white paint spots, as from a bit of dark brushwork. (Was the dark bird the work of some special technique – application-then-removal of a little bird-shaped paper that protected the canvas from the flicking of white paint? Possible.) But the effect is at least four layers of transparent white: the spray in front, the vertical drop of water in back, the alighting bird, and the beams of sun. It is quite a show, unsubtle, but if you can paint it, flaunt it, baby, and it quite justifies the counterbalancing turquoise action on the other side.

the time machine of selfhood

From Mark Twain's chapter in Following the Equator on Mumbai:

Our rooms were high up, on the front. A white man – he was a burly German – went up with us, and brought three natives along to see to arranging things. About fourteen others followed in procession, with the hand-baggage; each carried an article – and only one; a bag, in some cases, in other cases less. One strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in the procession had no load but a fan. It was all done with earnestness and sincerity, there was not a smile in the procession from the head of it to the tail of it. Each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his way. They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both winning and touching about their demeanor.

There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony. It needed closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn't, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. It seemed such a shame to do that before us all. The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. 

My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie – which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly – as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man's skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. 

I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

It is curious – the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood – fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!

Some natives – I don't remember how many – went into my bedroom, now, and put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to nurse my cough. It was about nine in the evening. What a state of things! For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet--what a racket it was! They were yelling orders and messages down three flights. Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a revolution. And then there were other noises mixed up with these and at intervals tremendously accenting them – roofs falling in, I judged, windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding, and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws blaspheming, and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of dynamite. By midnight I had suffered all the different kinds of shocks there are, and knew that I could never more be disturbed by them, either isolated or in combination. Then came peace – stillness deep and solemn and lasted till five.

storm within the storm

Even as a snowstorm bears down and Third Avenue in Manhattan is white with fresh, blowing snow, the cars honk for movement the instant the light turns green.

say

Only after they were cursed, was it that they had eaten.  Only after her son murdered her son, had Eve already had her eyes opened.  The consequence makes the cause, and this is the root of law.

cry

Our concepts of God are shaped less by contemplation of the innocent and the virtuous and the beautiful - these instead supply the substance - but instead are shaped by our need to understand, to limit, to avoid, and to move on from awareness of evil.  It is sickness and not health, infection and not purity, that teaches us what it is to keep a hospital clean.

olive trees and buffalo

Deep within the visceral feel of America for Israel is our conquest of the West.

glories

The expression come true.

lyrical tempo

Psalm 135 builds, builds - and builds - its mockery of idols, stretches the bow of the hearer's patience to the point that one doubts the psalmist's basic skill.  And then the arrow of attention is released in verse 18 to strike both the idol maker and the idolator in a quick, snide arc that explains the buildup.  A fine example of pacing that works entirely when sung or chanted - imagine what it must have been like in a setting where idolatry was a current events topic - but is lost when read at the pace given to print.

Switching frames, Psalm 135 is the sort of psalm that calls out for an Anglican boys choir.  The artful, seeming naivety, the delight, and occasionally - as here - the mockery: each sounds naturally in the refined playground of their voices.

America Today, Benson

If your eye is good, an artist must serve you by method, by presentation, or by difference of eye. If your eye is not good, it is more important and enough that the artist help you to see. 

an orchard of Bloomberg boxes

I am convinced of the value of monetary liquidity.  This is a neutral value, in the sense that it its goodness is nothing but an avoidance of cost: the cost to individuals and enterprise of capital being unavailable.  To the extent we avoid it we remain at the starting position, rather than behind it.  That is valuable.

And I'm not optimistic that we could regulate what people invest in, or the forms investment may take, to the point of having a clean and simple menu of options that meet with general approval.  Or rather, that we could, but that the cost of this would, in illiquidity and diversion of greed to enterprise and the illicit, exceed the benefits.

Yes the markets are where the scoundrels are, and we can, do, and must keep cleaning the markets.  We must regulate and disclose and interfere and devote some of our best minds to this endless janitorial work.  But we can't fully clean up - or even nearly clean up - the markets.  We need them too much.

Because illiquidity would result from such the restrictions necessary to a total cleanup, and greed would divert rather than die.  The greed, the thin, logical, oily greed, rampant in the secondary securities market, would simply open shop and concentrate its vices there, or move under the table, to the extent it doesn't already (much as it already does in real estate or natural resources).

Greed is deathless in human affairs, although it can be squeezed, herded, diminished and made to do some productive work.  This is the great lesson of the US corporate bankruptcy system, which is a virtuous engine powered by channeling the driving steam of vice.  There is much more to so great a machine, but that is how it is driven.  It is beautiful, and sad, and works.  To an extent greed serves this role in the markets, but there is more steam and less machine.  It is not an iron judicial engine but an open rollicking hall.  Vast work is done, but with vaster waste.

On earth, in commerce, that is often the best we can hope for.  To make hell the downstairs kitchen of heaven.  To feed cool heaven with the cooking of hell.  To make that hellish kitchen a place where as few as possible are held to labor and instead a place where the greedy or vicious bring themselves and toil.

gondoliers

Mark Twain would have been Walt Disney if he could, and damn the wit. 

gallery 690

The pastel never fixed, her feathered face
Is, ever, delicate, fresh from bathing.
More present than today or here, her case
Keeps ambrosial air in glass and lathing.

And all of that costs money: lots of it.
Outside her case, the museum hums with wealth:
A twenty admits, but that’s not profit;
Rich patrons keep her pastel cheeks in health.

In fact they lended her, you read each name
On the placards beside, but only she
Breathes perfumed pastel strokes within the frame
And seizes men who pass her gallery.

Wisdom does not ask who is using whom,
But knows the dance that keeps her cheeks in bloom.