Cleavage.

PBS' FRONTLINE on Holocaust education in Germany ...

When you discuss this subject in your classrooms at the university level, how would you characterize the reactions and the responses of the students. How engaged are they?

You can really see a cleavage among students both of the third and fourth post-Holocaust generational cohorts. Of course, students who take classes on a voluntary basis on the Holocaust are usually more interested in the subject than other students; it's a self selected group already because courses on the Holocaust are not required courses in any field on the university level, so my experiences are certainly not representative. But still, the cleavage which I perceive in my classroom corresponds to cleavages observed in the qualitative research colleagues and I have conducted.

There are those students in the classroom who are more committed to learning about the Holocaust, to doing more research about the perpetrators' motives and the suffering of the victims, than maybe in any other previous generation of Germans. They intend to learn about anti-Semitism, including the anti-Semitism of their grandparents, a taboo topic in the debates of former decades which focused on Hitler's guilt or anonymous bureaucratic modern structures which were held responsible for Auschwitz. So there is a substantial amount of students who really want to know how it happened and how it could happen, and who were the culprits and the victims.

But then you also have a fair amount of students who are more strongly opposing Holocaust remembrance than previous generations. They seek a "normal" German national identity and feel the Holocaust is too much of a burden, not an important part of German history, and that it has been over-represented in the media and public discourse. [Those who] are looking for a conventional national German identity or "German pride," tend to split off the Holocaust as a "general phenomenon" similar to crimes of all other nations. They tend to reject a post-conventional moral understanding of history and identity which reflects that the Holocaust -- this unprecedented crime and genocide -- is indeed part of one's German collective self-identity and self-image, and it needs to be because you can neither rewrite history nor escape the fact that you are shaped by your social and cultural background.

The challenge is to self-reflect this criminal aspect of German history, including anti-Semitism. Those students who fully accept this particular responsibility and legacy tend to develop cosmopolitan, universalistic ethical values and post-national identities.But those students who say "I want to be proud of my country again and proud about our history" rather tend to -- and we have very substantial empirical studies about this -- not be interested in the Holocaust, not wanting to learn about it. They feel it is a burden which is superimposed to them by "others," and they tend to identify with rather conventional norms, ethnic identity narratives and moral systems.

Humanity in Action on "The Responsibility of Knowledge: Developing Holocaust Education for the Third Generation" ...

First, the goal of Holocaust education is to instruct the public “never to forget.” Second, the education is necessary to“develop competencies so that it never happens again.” Thus, Holocaust education, she believes, can be a tool for teaching democracy. As for the status quo, however, she laments that currently, Holocaust education only “imbues a sense of history, while human rights education gives the power to act.” Ideally, the two should not be mutually exclusive.

Frederick Douglass on memory ...

“In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator,” [Frederick Douglass] said at the conclusion of his dedication speech, “we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us ... it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth, and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate.”

Think.

From The Monuments Men ...

I'll think about my cigarette, and I'll think about you, sitting there with that stupid look on your face, I'll finish my coffee, leave the paper for Sid to wrap fish in and I'll never think of you again ...

Freedom.

Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1810

Steve reminds us that life is a mystery to be lived ... 

Story conveys the reality of human freedom, for although "real," our freedom is limited, and although "limited," our freedom is real ... 

We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic.

Responsible.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Viktor Frankel, from Man's Search for Meaning

Never.

Artificial Intelligence can tell us that Socrates said, "The unexamined life isn't worth living," but­­ A.I. hasn't a clue about what life is.  Life is the mind of man, nature looking creatively back on itself, setting forth on voyages of discovery.  Harrison taking life in large doses of rivers, forests, fish, grouse, thickets, dogs; Walt Whitman, vast and containing multitudes, yawping down the open road, embracing the common air and the profound individual; Mozart, alone, in good cheer, ideas flowing abundantly as he walks or lies awake, hearing the full symphony at once in his mind, humming dainty morsels into finished, joyful form, a delight beyond words.

In such silence and stillness the mind wanders wide ... and wonders never cease.

Faith.

It's Holocaust Remembrance Day ...

There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.

Elie Wiesel, from Night

Happy Birthday, Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart

Lange, Mozart, 1790

Mozart was born on this date in 1756.

Juanjo Mena conducts an unknown orchestra featuring Ángel Luis Sánchez Moreno, oboe, Carlos Ferreira, clarinet, Jesus Viedma, bassoon, and Pablo Fernandez, horn, in a performance of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds in E Flat Major, K297b  ...

Liberated.

On this date in 1945, the Nazi concentration camp and extermination facility at Auschwitz was liberated.

From PBS' Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State ...

As the Soviet army approached and the end of the war came closer the vast majority of Auschwitz prisoners were marched west by the Nazis, into Germany. Those few thousand remaining were thought too ill to travel, and were left behind to be shot by the SS. In the confusion that followed the abandonment of the camp, the SS left them alive. The prisoners were found by Soviet forces when they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened.

"They [the prisoners] began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell."

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's history is HERE.

He struck me as a normal person, that was the horrible thing about it. He was cool, objective, matter of fact. "This is my war duty. I did my war duty. It was like I had to go out and cut down so many trees. So I went out and took my saw and cut the trees down." He was just acting like a normal, unimportant individual.

He simply answered the questions, and as far as I could tell, told what happened without emotion. Without emotion. Without a sense of guilt. Not in the slightest apologetic, not in the remotest degree was he apologetic. In a sense, I think he showed a certain pride in accomplishment.

Whitney Harris, member of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials

Always.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, General MacArthur

"Fudge the regulations!" he charged. "They're sometimes made to be broken for the good of the whole. Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind."

General Douglas MacArthur, born on this day in 1880, from MacArthur Close Up

Jimmy Buffett, "Turn Up the Heat and Chill the Rose"

You need some imagination to deal with temperature fluctuation ...

Excellent.

Excellent albums, Sly & Robbie at their best ...

Sly Dunbar, Rest in Peace

Sly Drumbar has passed.

With Robbie and Black Uhuru in '81 ...

Enjoy.

Listen.

Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful.

Bourgeau, Super Moon, 2023

Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.

Norton Juster, from The Phantom Tollbooth

Wales.

Deeper.

Rapacki, In the Library, 1928

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes ...

Virginia Woolf

Enlighten.

Johnston, Students in the Reading Room of the Library of Congress with the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, Watching, 1899

On this day in 1802, Congress passed an act calling for a library to be established within the U.S. Capitol.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

State.

Schoolcraft, A Map of the Acting Superintendency of Michigan, 1837

Michigan became the 26th state on this day in 1837.

Eternal.

Stuart, George Washington (The Constable-Hamilton Portrait), 1797

 

Dr. Robert F. Williams on the foundations of civilian control of the military ...

Thinking of civil-military relationships after the war, he urged his “virtuous fellow Citizens in the field” that they “should carry with them into civil Society the most conciliating dispositions; and that they should prove themselves not less virtuous and usefull as Citizens than they have been persevering and victorious as Soldiers.” The army began demobilizing, and British forces departed New York City at noon on 25 November. Washington was careful to let civilian authorities reclaim the city, not his army, although he rode in with the New York militia regiments alongside Governor Clinton.

After securing New York City, Washington focused on returning to civil life. On 19 December 1783, he arrived in Annapolis, where the Continental Congress was operating, and on 23 December 1783—eight years, six months, and five days after Congress granted him command of the army in Philadelphia—he surrendered his commission in front of Congress in Annapolis. In prepared remarks, Washington closed the loop on the civil-military relationship granted in his initial commission of June 1775. “The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place,” he remarked, “I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress & of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country.” He then returned to Mount Vernon just in time for Christmas.

At that moment, he rejected becoming an American Caesar and instead chose to embody Cincinnatus. Educated like most of his generation on popularizations of ancient history, Washington had patterned his behavior on his understanding of Roman heroes. Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato: A Tragedy shaped Washington’s conception of himself as he took steps to model his behavior from the Roman leader who exemplified public virtue and liberty. Fabian served as his example for victory and Cincinnatus for his postwar life. Cincinnatus is famous for having picked up the sword when called to save his country in 458 BCE and laying it down again to return to the plough and the life of a yeoman farmer. He embodied the citizen-soldier ideal that influenced Enlightenment thinking on the matter.

Washington’s experience provides ample material for students of civil-military relations. His experience, on the one hand, suggests that civilians and citizen-soldiers are effective, that expertise in arms was unnecessary in a republic, and that the need for a professional officer corps was moot. Despite Washington’s argument for the contrary, his experience fueled advocates for a small military establishment ...

The “myth of Cincinnatus,” that valiant citizens will defend the country when called has informed how Americans have mobilized and prepared for war since the revolution.  Washington understood that citizen-soldier militias were limited, which informed his desire to develop a well-paid, professional standing army. This tension, however, lay at the base of contemporary notions of civilian control of the military and was something with which Washington struggled throughout the conflict.

Mackubin Thomas Owens at Hillsdale on civilian-military relations ...

All service members learn early in their training that they have an affirmative obligation to refuse unlawful orders. But service members do not get to refuse orders because they disagree with the administration’s policies. And this video, at the very least, carelessly blurs the line between these things in a way to undermine trust between civilian policymakers and the military and between seniors and subordinates within the military.

The video was clearly political in nature and is likely to foster confusion within the military ranks. The lawmakers failed to identify any specifics regarding unlawful orders. Nor did they offer examples of the kinds of orders soldiers should refuse to obey. Without context, the phrase “refuse illegal orders” blurs the line between legitimate legal instruction and political signaling. For a system that depends on discipline, clarity, and stability, ambiguity is a real problem.

The civil–military implications are serious. Civilian control of the military rests on a clear hierarchy. Congress passes laws, the executive directs operations, and the military follows lawful commands. By addressing the troops directly about which orders to follow, the participants in the video disrupt that structure. Military leaders, not legislators, are responsible for issuing guidance to troops on how to evaluate or report questionable orders. 

Samuel Adams from The Rights of the Colonists: The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, November 20, 1772

Governors have no right to seek and take what they please; by this, instead of being content with the station assigned them, that of honorable servants of the society, they would soon become absolute masters, despots, and tyrants. Hence, as a private man has a right to say what wages he will give in his private affairs, so has a community to determine what they will give and grant of their substance for the administration of public affairs. And, in both cases, more are ready to offer their service at the proposed and stipulated price than are able and willing to perform their duty.

In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.

Wish.

ADDRESS to a HAGGIS

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!

Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,

Painch, tripe, or thairm:

Weel are ye wordy of a grace

As lang ‘s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,

Your hurdies like a distant hill,

Your pin wad help to mend a mill

In time o’ need,

While thro’ your pores the dews distil

Like amber bead.

His knife see Rustic-labour dight,

An’ cut ye up wi’ ready slight,

Trenching your gushing entrails bright,

Like onie ditch;

And then, O what a glorious sight,

Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an’ strive:

Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,

Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve

Are bent like drums;

Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,

Bethankit hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout,

Or olio that wad staw a sow,

Or fricassee wad mak her spew

Wi’ perfect sconner,

Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view

On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,

As feckless as a wither’d rash,

His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,

His nieve a nit;

Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,

O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,

The trembling earth resounds his tread,

Clap in his walie nieve a blade,

He’ll make it whissle;

An’ legs, an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,

Like taps o’ thrissle.

Ye Pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,

And dish them out their bill o’ fare,

Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware

That jaups in luggies;

But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,

Gie her a Haggis!

Robert Burns

Ossian, "Drunk at Night, Dry in the Morning"

Happy Burns Night!

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

It's sandwich time.

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf

Craftsmanship

Words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word "incarnadine," for example – who can use that without remembering "multitudinous seas"? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word "incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas." To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you'd pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-lectured, un-criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady's reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Virginia Woolf, born on this day in 1882

Magic.

Saveur on the magic of herring ...

I try a dozen varieties at Ulriksdals Wardshus, a white manor house set on acres of woodlands near Stockholm, where chef Karl-Heinz Krucken presides over one of Scandinavia's renowned smorgasbords (literally, ''bread-and-butter tables''). The buffet includes smoked eel, reindeer, Swedish meatballs, and two kinds of gravlax, but the centerpiece is the herring: bathed in tomato or curry sauce, panfried, mixed with anchovies and apples—17 preparations in all. Despite the collection of first-growth bordeaux in the wine cellar, Krucken insists the herring be eaten with a traditional shot of aquavit and a mug of beer. It's an idyllic Scandinavian scene, but Krucken worries about the future. ''Someday you'll tell your grandchildren, 'I was in Sweden and they still had herring,''' he says. ''A fairy tale!''

Happy Birthday, Benjamin Robert Haydon

Haydon, Bartholomew Fair, 1808

Benjamin Robert Haydon was born on this day in 1786.

Arrives.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet

Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;

Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Towner, Rest in Peace

I just heard that Ralph Towner passed this week.

"Father Time"...

Keep.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I, just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.

Emily Dickinson

Sviridov, Snowstorm

Vladimir Fedoseyev leads the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performs of the "Echo Waltz" ...

Happy Birthday, Robert Burns

Nasmyth, Robert Burns, 1787

Where Cart rins rowin' to the sea,

By mony a flower and spreading tree,

There lives a lad, the lad for me,

He is a gallant Weaver.

O, I had wooers aught or nine,

They gied me rings and ribbons fine;

And I was fear'd my heart wad tine,

And I gied it to the Weaver.

My daddie sign'd my tocher-band,

To gie the lad that has the land,

But to my heart I'll add my hand,

And give it to the Weaver.

While birds rejoice in leafy bowers,

While bees delight in opening flowers,

While corn grows green in summer showers,

I love my gallant Weaver

Robert Burns, born on this day in 1759

Skylark performs James MacMillian's sublime setting of Burns' verse ...

Old Blind Dogs, "Knucklehead Circus"

Know.

Hollis/Buckler, Bodleian Library, Oxford, n/d

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Alberto Manguel, from The Library at Night

von Bingen, Spiritus Sanctus

Geraldine Zeller, soprano, and Helge Burggrabe, recorder, perform ...

Hold.

van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

Susan Sontag

We frequently have conversations after dinner concerning influence and where some loved ones get bogged down and desperate, I can see clearly and confidently.  

Saving the planet is impossible.  Saving the world sitting with you at dinner is not only possible, but paramount.  Listen, ask questions, listen some more, think, discuss, hold hands -- tightly, pat on the back and hug. Disagree?  Listen some more.  Think.  Keep talking.  Stay together.  Come back to the table.  Listen. 

Then act.

 

Your world is small. Possible.  Paramount.

Stay out of my yard.

Talked.

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over, and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

Kenneth Grahame, from The Wind in the Willows

Find.

De Saedeleer, The Forest in Winter, 1925

WINTER WALK

The holly bush, a sober lump of green,

Shines through the leafless shrubs all brown and grey,

And smiles at winter be it eer so keen

With all the leafy luxury of May.

And O it is delicious, when the day

In winter's loaded garment keenly blows

And turns her back on sudden falling snows,

To go where gravel pathways creep between

Arches of evergreen that scarce let through

A single feather of the driving storm;

And in the bitterest day that ever blew

The walk will find some places still and warm

Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm

To little birds that flirt and start away.

John Clare

From Jack London's short story, "To Build a Fire" ...

The man sat in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness.  Then he pulled on his mittens, using his teeth, and then stood on his feet. He glanced down to assure himself that he was really standing, because lack of feeling in his feet gave him no relation to the earth.  His position, however, removed the fear from the dog’s mind.  

When he commanded the dog with his usual voice, the dog obeyed and came to him. As it came within his reach, the man lost control.  His arms stretched out to hold the dog and he experienced real surprise when he discovered that his hands could not grasp. There was neither bend nor feeling in the fingers. He had forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and more. All this happened quickly and before the animal could escape, he encircled its body with his arms. He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while it barked and struggled.  

But it was all he could do: hold its body encircled in his arms and sit there. He realized that he could not kill the dog. There was no way to do it. With his frozen hands he could neither draw nor hold his knife. Nor could he grasp the dog around the throat. He freed it and it dashed wildly away, still barking. It stopped 40 feet away and observed him curiously, with ears sharply bent forward.

The man looked down at his hands to locate them and found them hanging on the ends of his arms. He thought it curious that it was necessary to use his eyes to discover where his hands were. He began waving his arms, beating the mittened hands against his sides. He did this for five minutes. His heart produced enough blood to stop his shaking. But no feeling was created in his hands.

On.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Burning Spear, "Foggy Day"

The Specials, "You're Wondering Now"

Illumination.

No merely critical standpoint can build, let alone "conserve" anything. One can lament the fire ravaging Notre Dame, but a dislike of fire confers exactly none of the knowledge required to build—or indeed, rebuild—that magnificent monument of Western culture. For that, you need architectural-mathematical understanding, aesthetic vision, as well as stone-carvers, carpenters, vitrailleurs, and so forth. Lamenting the Cathedral’s destruction is one thing; rebuilding it is another.

Sir Roger understood that. You can’t counter nihilism, you can’t defeat the iconoclasts, by critique alone. Indeed, even to focus primarily on critique is already to concede that the game is one of tearing-down, one of destruction.  

Once, when I asked him about how to build, and rebuild, he playfully replied: we can’t be about "debunking". Rather, we need "bunking". 

We need to know how to build.

Culture, he went on to say, is simply "the things we have loved". 

Love is the only principle capable of conserving, of transmitting, or of building, anything at all.

So-called conservatives too often think it is enough to be right: right about the economy, right about systems of government, right about civic association, right about fundamental freedoms and dignity. 

But being right isn’t enough. When you have young people burning cities and convinced that their culture is intrinsically oppressive, that its fundamental principles are perverse—then, it is safe to say to conservatives (as the meme goes)—you had one job, and you failed. 

A culture does not, it cannot, continue without mechanisms for its own transmission. The West, terrible though it is to say, no longer has those. 

Sir Roger understood that. He understood that the only way to pass along a culture, the only way to conserve those things we love, is actually to pass them along—to share that love, to instill it in another, and in the young especially. Naturally, Sir Roger knew this was a bedrock philosophical insight of the Western tradition, wonderfully articulated in Aristotle’s De anima, and taken up by Augustine, Dante, the Enlightenment, and elsewhere: that is, that an act of will follows, and only follows, the illumination of intellect. 

Stephen Blackwood, "Thoughts from a Life: The Importance of 'Bunking'"

Vigor.

Times have changed. We have seen the passing of the blackjack and the accordion. Few of us sing alone on our porches on summer evenings, watching the sexual dance of fireflies in the burdocks beside the barn. The buzz of the airport metal detector is more familiar than the sound of the whippoorwill or coyote. The world gets to you with its big, heavy, sharp-toed boot. We are either “getting ready” or “getting over.” Our essential and hereditary wildness slips, crippled, into the past. The jackhammer poised daily at our temples is not fictive, nor is the fact that all the ceilings have lowered, and the cold ozone that leaks under the door is merely a signal that the old life is over. There is a Native American prophecy that the end is near when trees die from their tops down (acid rain).

To be frank, this is not the time for the “less is more” school when it comes to eating. The world as we know it has always been ending, every day of our lives. Good food and good cooking are a struggle for the appropriate and, as such, a response to the total environment. Anyone who has spent an afternoon in New York has seen the sullen and distraught faces of those who have eaten julienned jicama with raspberry vinaigrette and a glass of European water for lunch.

But let's not dwell on the negative, the wine of illusion. You begin with simple truths in food: for instance, peeling sweetbreads is not really exercise. When you're trimming a two-pound porterhouse, don't make those false, hyperkinetic motions favored by countermen in delicatessens. Either trim it or skip trimming. Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor.

Jim Harrison, from Just Before Dark

Mukwa ... bear medicine.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Lord Byron

Phillips, Lord Byron, 1814

STANZAS for MUSIC

There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like thee;

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing

The charmed ocean's pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:

And the midnight moon is weaving

Her bright chain o'er the deep;

Whose breast is gently heaving,

As an infant's asleep:

So the spirit bows before thee,

To listen and adore thee;

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

Lord George Gordon Byron, born on this day in 1788

Black Uhuru, "World is Africa"