do

Boredom is a kind of pain, and should be reacted to as such.

transparency

Opacity saves us.  Imagine your eyes held open to the thoughts, even merely the lives, or even only the relatively happy lives, of others - even a few dozen others.

Dubai 2345

There is a numbing quality to seeing Florence that damps the excitement of the art and innovation.  Unlike Chichen Itza or Yosemite - or even Milan - Florence was destined to be a tourist city, and deserves it by merit and demerit alike.  The numbness comes from commerce.  This was art commissioned by, for and directed to merchants, on the whole, though with a sizable slice reserved for God, for innovation, for delight, and for the artists themselves, in their non-commercial aspects.

One sees that the current, money-soaked, transparently mercenary art world is a repetition, and therefore largely a result of certain conditions that have recurred.  In today's Florence - I mean the historic core, not the ordinary automobile-and-supermarkets city that surrounds it - you are either a rich tourist, or a spiritually and historically minded tourist, or you are cattle, to be fed watery gelato, shuttled through a few key (but generally not best) sites, and packed onto rail cars for the ride home.  In Medici Florence, you were a merchant, a spiritual, an artist, or fodder.

I've had the time and means to travel to places that awe: Walpi, Durham, Uxmal.  And nearing these one feels a sort of embarrassment - the sense that one must tread gently, quiet one's thoughts, and be grateful.  In Florence, there is no embarrassment.  The city has you trodding on monk's graves - there is no other way to the ticket stand to see the cloistered spaces within.  There's no point in feeling sacred about the profaned.

So what to do?  How to enjoy and absorb such a city?  Straddle.  Find the smaller spaces of excellence. Casa Martelli, the Bargello, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the gaze of a character straight out from a minor panel of a bronze door, looking at you.  Eat simply.  Then take some time to be the shopper, the merchant, the crass, walleted animal that would go to the Gucci Museum.  Fight the nausea and understand - and if the Gucci Museum won't teach it, little will - that merchandising is the art of throwing fake pearls before those who've learned to imitate swine.  Go to the Cappelle Medicee and see what it means for true narcissists to go hog wild for exotic colored marble - at the Pietre Dure you'll learn that they bought so much of it, from the four corners of the globe, that hundreds of years later, they are warehousing enough exotic stone to last hundreds of years more, even if they were still building, and not merely restoring.

In the end, why see Florence and its like?  Because it is does not transport the modern visitor, but instead reports.  It reports to the modern visitor that our condition is simply a mode of living that has long been with us, in the merchant cities.  Aniline, pacific and selfish.

sing

Give me five minutes to tell the unvarnished truth, and I'll sadden anyone.

Milan and Florence in view

Milano and Firenze

epoch

Imitation is the sincerest form of boredom.

Firenze

If you would have the arts flourish, bring your checkbook.  Art is not culture, nor society, but an act of each upon wealth.  In New York, they might almost be called the Metropolitan Museum of Wealth and the Museum of Modern Wealth.

a cord of chords

That which is right and durably profitable is hard or by chance. Of chance nothing need nor usefully can be said. Of what is hard, then: most such is not both right and durably profitable; much is neither. So we hazard, do without, or discern amongst difficulties. This discernment of right profit is by iteration, inversion and study. That is our prime work; it is wisdom. Upon it, our second and third work: accordingly to serve and so to build.

George Eliot

The Kingdom of Heaven is one of those rare theological ideas with use, beauty and power outside its specific religious frame.  It articulates that strange, invisible, but present fabric of good that binds society - or that, absent, consigns a people to chaotic evil.  I learned what the Kingdom of Heaven is, and how it helps us to understand it, as much from Eliot as from the gospels.

how many proverbs did you need

Intelligence is less often so much overrated as it is oversupplied - in cities.  The intelligent person can do wonders with a tree or field, stream or shelter - wonders unavailable to the stupid.  But there is less the intelligent can do in society extensive and fluid enough - ours - to sort the intelligent and stupid into their own communities.  In competition with peers, the intelligent lose their advantage; in cooperation with peers, they loose their needfulness.

grabbing

I shall run out of Earth, or my interest in it as an observer, before I come to an end of myself.  And in this is the need of work beyond pay.

Fred Rogers

Nothing is harder than righteous decency.  It is utterly breakable, but only from within, and demands one be true right through.

sins of the office

False precision.  Intensified language as a form of courtesy.  Degrading one institution or person for having faults shared by all, or nearly all.  Shifting rather than handling.

not a trick question: why must there be three - not two - servants?

The parable of the talents, from the Gospel of Matthew:

For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.  And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.  

Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.  And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.  But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.

After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.  And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.  His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.  He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.  His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

flow

We make our great changes in life with wonder at the unexpectedness of precisely what we planned, at the sameness our mere consciousness imposes on altered surroundings, and at the world: which absorbs and becomes alteration in heaving tides.  We are ocean creatures after all.

mars

The more we research, the more we plan, the more we examine a major life choice, the more the honest person knows that certain mistakes have been avoided, certain advantages seen, but the thing itself is stubbornly unknown.  Garrison Keillor is right.  All marriages are arranged marriages.  All new careers are expeditions into the deep woods.

negotiation

One must be a thoroughly civilized savage either to thrive in a city or to relish application of the polishing force of social morality.  Lose the inner iron of savagery, and one becomes a servant, not in posture (as we all must often be) but in essence.  Let slip the clothing of civilization and one is revealed as a poorly beast, glabrous and limp.

tipple

To fight is to be in one's natural state. Ask a butterfly. To be in repose is to be Olympian. Ask the vacationer. 

judge's bench

Praise corrupts the decision maker, so decisions should not be made by the praised.  But we need praise and approval, we need to be valued.  The effect of praise is greater when it comes from those in a higher position, or from one's peers, and above all from one's trusted loved ones.  So important decisions are best made impartially, from a slight remove and at a slight elevation, by someone disinterested.  This same conclusion, of course, is reached by many other pats.

Great Hall, New York Hall of Science; TWA Flight Center

We used to be more modern.