vacation

A pleasing blank.

enlightenment

It is too simple to be true, but it gets at something: reason can be conceived as an elaboration of, as an evolved descendant of, animal aggression. One might even say that a rational form of government is violent on a different plane. I do not say "is merely violent on a different plane": dimension and development of the violence matter plenty if, for example, the difference is a reduction in bloodshed.

man in

There's a minute or two, some eveings, during which the sky has the same luminous intensity and saturation of hue as the lamps of the traffic light. One looks up from the cross walk and is greeting by a beautiful full green moon.

gestation

In the day since seeing it, Un Prophète has matured in my mind from one of the finest movies I've seen (not least for the sustained, perspectival morality necessary to and motivating its formal amorality). As I say, it has matured in my mind over the last day from one of the best movies I've seen into one of the best interior experiences I've had. The pregnant bleakness of this movie reminds me of only one other cinematic creation I know: those stony, white-painted, hard-staring scenes from Fanny and Alexander set in the Bishop's house.

There are other correspondences between those Bishop's house scenes and the French prison scenes: the cinematic treatment of white, bright sunlight as a symbol for a certain kind of insistent evil - the peculiar evil latent in bleach or lime.

Dichogamy

It is interesting - not all that productive, though - to think of much human work as peculiarly generated by the interaction of young adults and elders, thought of as two genders, understood more in contrast than in isolation.

genesis

Other
Connection
Item
Transaction

comfort my people

It comes as a momentary shock - but then as a realization of the obvious - to understand that a powerful factor in the development of the viewpoints of most people is the desire for comfort.

elves

The human mind: so cause-happy. I glance under my desk this morning and see a few strewn dots of paper, fallen from my three-hole punch. Somehow the patten was celebratory, like confetti, and one hears the mental question, half-embarassed at itself: "was there a tiny party down there last night?"

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly - mind gotta find causes.

tipple

To have a few vices feels (is?) invigorating. It flatters one's (confirms one's?) freedom.

But to be had by a vice is to know the truth of Christ's comparison: sin is a harder master than virtue.

A personal discipline, though, does all that vice does - both in vigor and in harshness - and though it usually yields nothing, it may yield much.

go on

One of the low down, awful things about me is that I would often rather fill in a spreadsheet with numbers -

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (even now I want to keep going)...

- I would often rather do that than think about something serious. And that's low down.

go

The feeling of mental inertia - the difficulty in starting a task and the ease of continuing it once begun - is so similar to the phenomenon of physical inertia, that one wonders whether, somehow, deep in the brain, mental inertia simply is physical inertia.

One wonders this even though mental inertia is easy to account for from thought based causes: clearing distractions, gathering facts, ordering work, segmenting concepts. All of that beginning-work is harder than execution, even when execution is drudgery.

dray

Facts, stubborn factual truth, rule the necessary barnyards of life - law firms, pharmacies, warehouses, the land. The temples, though, belong to ministers of feeling reaching for truths of force: churches, prisons, courtrooms, the sea.

vow

Strictly speaking, I don't think it is possible to betray or honor an individual. One betrays a common understanding (usually common to more than the subject and object). The individual may be harmed or upheld, but it is something held in common (though not necessarily by the betraying subject) that is betrayed or honored.

Put short: Fidelity and infidelity are necessarily public acts.

neckbone

Why think epigrammatically? The epigram reaches the joint of reason to moral sentiment, which is its motive or master. The epigram pleases and is understood by moral sentiment, which delights in being noticed and shaped. And by focusing on the rational joint, the epigram obtains leverage, and the feeling, to the listener, of resulting movement is a revelation of self that delights, even when the matter of the epigram is unhappy.

chirp

Sir, you are poor because you have too little to sell.

sophistication

Lacenaire: I'd spill torrents of blood to give you rivers of diamonds.

Garance: I'd settle for less.

doctorow

How did I get this far into my reading (and adult) life without knowing the word mons?

godzilla

The wretchedness of individual man is the certainty of death and the lack of much to give or subsist upon.

The wretchedness of social man is that, to avoid bloodshed, we must tend to, placate and occasionally give way to that rather nasty agglomeration: a majority.

The glory of individual man is a peaceful path to a simple end, especially when that course was sweet to those nearby who knew it.

The glory of social man is the commerce of ideas and goods amongst the cities.

redden

Ordinarily, in court, the truth will out.

this is what I try to give

One strand of maturation is to appreciate better the role of gift-wrapping paper.