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.