Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Allan Bloom

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom, born on this day in 1930, from The Closing of the American Mind

Ring.

Quiet friend of the many distances, feel

How your breath still enlarges space.

Let yourself ring out, a dark cradled bell

In the timbering. That, which erodes you

Gains a strength from your sustenance.

Go out and in, through transformation.

What do you know of the greatest loss?

Is drinking bitter? Then, become wine.

Be, in this night made of excess,

The magic art at the crossroads of senses,

The feel of their strange encounter.

And, if the earthbound forget you,

Say to the silent Earth: I flow.

To the rushing water: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy Birthday, General Pershing

If you know how to shoot, and are quite ready to shoot, the chances are that you won’t have to shoot.

General John J. Pershing, born on this day in 1860, from My Experiences in the World War

Happy Birthday, Neil Peart

Neil Peart was born on this day in 1952.

"Digital Man"...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, H.L. Mencken

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

H.L. Mencken, born on this day in 1880, from the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1923

Gratitude.

FDNY Engine 28 Firefighter Mike Kehoe headed up on September 11, 2001 ...

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Everlasting.

All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is a City of God, which men did not build, and cannot destroy, and which is everlasting.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom

Hang.

It's Joe Perry's birthday and, by God, that's a good enough reason to begin the weekend now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."     

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this: the lastest incarnation of The Joe Perry Project, "Let the Music Do the Talking"...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Silence.

You don’t need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man’s silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Wendell Berry, from Jayber Crow

Learn.

The West's greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. 

Harold Bloom, from The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Tension.

From Russell Kirk's "Ten Conservative Principles"...

[T]he conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Fighting.

The word impossible does not exist for me. I’ve got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die — and might keep on fighting afterward, depends on where I am.

Ted Turner

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

To prioritize victory over rather than coexistence with the communist threat.

Distance.

SOMEWHERE OVER CHINA

Just a semi-normal person

Thought he had the future planned

Then he won some silly sweepstakes

Now he had a hundred grand

Never stopped to think of taxes

He was gone before they knew

With a flair for old romantics

To the Orient he flew

When they fueled in Papeete

Place a call to Big Mamou

With an honest explanation

Just to tell the whole damn truth

It's his one chance in a million

Who'd deny the simple fact

Twas no use to talk it over

He'd be home when he got back

Now he's somewhere over China

Lookin' down on all the trails

On the mountains lookin' back at him

It's a real live fairy tale

Put a little distance

Between causes and effects

Like a day-old fortune cookie

Askin' who or what comes next

What the hell did Marco Polo think

When he ran into the wall

Or the crazy Flying Tigers

Doin' spins and loops and stalls

Just a taste for something different

Perking up a boring day

Now our man from Louisiana

Feels exactly the same way

They're all somewhere over China

Shanghai or old Peking

On a plane or a boat in an envelope

Real adventure has it's ring

Just to put a little distance

Between fact and fantasy

Still six thousand miles away from

where I really want to be

How I would love to drive the shuttle

Just to feel the engines roar

And to operate the levers

That control the payload doors

I could buzz the Himalayas

Barrel roll above Hong Kong

Set her down in San Francisco

To the clanging of the gong

We're all somewhere over China

Headin' east of headin' west

Takin' time to live a little

Flying so far from the nest

Just to put a little distance

Between causes and effects

Like an ancient fortune teller

Knowin' who and what comes next

Jimmy Buffett

Solace.

NUN'S FRET NOT at THEIR CONVENT'S NARROW ROOM

In truth the prison, unto which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

William Wordsworth

Liberty.

Gardner, "The Last Photograph Taken of Lincoln from Life," 1865

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.

Abraham Lincoln, from his address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore April 18, 1864

Absence.

If we can wander, without fear, not only in the streets of Paris, which bristle with police, but especially in rustic walks where you rarely meet passersby, is it to the police that we owe this security or rather to the absence of people who care to rob or murder us?

Pyotr Kropotkin, from "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal"

Wait.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

Epictetus, from The Enchiridion

Anarchy.

Lafayette got me thinking about Professor Bloom's thoughts in the Preface of The Western Canon ...

Things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called "the learned world." 

Happy Birthday, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette

Sully, Life Study of The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

Marquis de Lafayette, born on this day in 1757, from the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"

Happy Birthday, Johann Christian Bach

Gainsborough, Portrait of Johann Christian Bach, 1776

Johann Christian Bach was born on this day in 1735.

Sophia Schambeck performs the Allegro con spirito from the Sonata for Harpsichord and Flute op. 16, No. 5, accompanied by the unfortunate clanger racket of Alexander von Heißen ...

Wonder.

What I wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school.

What would I have wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school, or what would I want them to tell me if I became a student again?

Tales about my vacations? No. Those of my classmates? No. I would already know everything. You have to study? This is going to be difficult? We’re going to have to make more of an effort? No, no thank you. I know. This is why I’m here, and besides I’m deaf from the ear of duties. Tell me something different, something new, so that I don’t start getting bored already, but rather that I might feel even just a slight desire to start this school year. From the ear of passion, I can hear perfectly.

Show me that it’s worth my while to stay here for a whole year listening to you. Tell me please that all this will be relevant to my everyday life, that it will help me better understand the world and myself, that it’s worthwhile for me to be here. Show me, most of all through your own lives, that the effort you demand of me will fill my own life the way it fills yours. You have dedicated studies, efforts and dreams to teach me your subject, now show be that it’s all true, that you are conveyors of something desirable and indispensable, something that you own and that you wish to impart upon me as a gift. Show me that you lose sleep to teach me these things that — you say — are worth my efforts. I want to look into your eyes and if they’re not shining I’m going to get bored, I’m telling you now, and I’m going to do something else. You can’t lie to me. If you don’t believe it, then why should I? And don’t tell me about your salaries, about the union, about [Italian education minister] Gelmini, about your family and relationship troubles, about your failures and your obsessions. No. Tell me about how much you love the force of the sun that has burned for 5 billion years and transforms hydrogen into light, life and energy. Tell me how this happens, this miracle that will continue for at least another 5 billion years. Tell me why the moon always shows me her same face and teach me how to interrogate her like Leopardi’s shepherd did. Tell me how it’s possible that a rose has petals arranged according to a divine and infallible proportion and why the heart is a muscle that beats involuntarily and how the eye transforms light into images.

There are so many things in this world that I don’t know and that you could teach me, with eyes shining, because only wonder knows.

And tell me about the mystery of humans, tell me how the Greeks built their temples that you feel like you’re in contact with the gods, and how the Romans managed to combine beauty and utility like nobody else. Tell me how Leonardo da Vinci did it, how Magellan did it. Tell me the secret of Einstein, Gaudi’, or Mozart. If you know it, tell me.

Tell me, how am I supposed to decide what to do with my life, if I don’t know about the lives of others? Tell me, how am I supposed to find my own story, if I have not a bit of passion for those that left their mark? Tell me what I should gamble my life for. Or no, don’t tell me. I will decide for myself. You show me the possibilities. Help me discover my passions, my talents, and my dreams. And remember that you will only succeed if you yourself have dreams, projects and passions of your own. Otherwise how am I supposed to believe you? And remind me that my life is not repeatable, that it’s made for greatness, and help me not to settle for small pleasures, real and virtual, that may satisfy me in the moment, but that deep down just bore me…

Challenge me, put my best qualities to the test, and write them on your register along with all those grades that are always the same. Help me not to believe illusions, not to live on dreams filled with air, but at the same time teach me to dream and to have the patience to realize these dreams, turning them into projects.

Teach me to reason, such that I may not derive my beliefs from common cliches, from the dominant thought, from unreasoned thought. Help me to be free. Remind me of the unity of knowlegde and don’t tell me about the unity of Italy, but be united among each other: don’t talk ill of one another, I beg you. And remind me of how beautiful this country is, talk about it, make me want to discover everything it is hiding before I begin to long for a tropical vacation.

And please, one last favor, keep your cynicism to yourselves. Don’t hide your battles from me, but give me the strength to bear them and don’t poison my hopes even before I have conceived them.

For this, one day, I will remember you.

Thank you, Prof. 2.0.

Know.

CHAPTER 3, BEING ALIVE

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

We know now what the quality without a name is like, in feeling and in character. But so far, concretely, we have not seen this quality in any system larger than a tree, a pond, a bench. Yet it can be in anything – in buildings, animals, plants, cities, streets, the wilderness – and in ourselves. We shall begin to understand it concretely, in all these larger pieces of the world, only when we first understand it in ourselves.

It is, for instance, the wild smile of the gypsies dancing in the road.

The broad brim of the big hat, like arms spread wide, open to the world, confident, huge, … the embrace of the child’s arms about the grass … it is the solid and entrenched repose of the old man lighting a cigarette: hands on his knees, solid, resting, waiting, listening.

In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.

And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.

One man is free at that one instant when you see in him a certain smile and you know he is himself, and perfectly at home within himself. Imagine him especially, perhaps and for one instant utterly oblivious to everything but what is in him and around him at that second.

This wild freedom, this passion comes into our lives in the instant we let go.

It is when all our forces can move freely in us. In nature, this quality is almost automatic, because there are no images to interfere with natural processes of making things. But in all of our creations, the possibility occurs that images can interfere with the natural necessary order of a thing. And, most of all, this way that images distort the things we make, is familiar in ourselves. For we ourselves are, like our works, the products of our own creation. And we are only free, and have the quality without a name in us, when we give up the images which guide our lives.

Yet each of us faces the fear of letting go. The fear of being exactly what one is, of letting the forces flow freely; of letting the configuration of one’s person adjust truly to these forces.

Our letting go is stifled, all the time, so long as we have ideas and opinions of ourselves, which make us hug too tightly to our images of how to live, and bottle up these forces.

So long as we are still bottled up, like this, there is a tightness about the mouth, a nervous tension in the eyes, and stiffness and a brittleness in the way we walk, the way we move.

And yet, until one does let go, in is impossible to be alive. The stereotypes are restricted; there are very different configurations. The infinite variety of actual people, with their vastly and utterly different, require a huge creation, to find the resolution of the person; and in finding this resolution truly, one must above all be free of the stereotypes.

The great film, Ikiru – “to live” – describes it in the life of an old man.

“He has sat for thirty years behind a counter, preventing things from happening. And he finds out that he is to die of cancer of the stomach, in six months. He tries to live; he seeks enjoyment; it doesn’t amount to much. And finally, against all obstacles, he helps to make a park in a dirty slum of Tokyo. He has lost his fear, because he knows that he is going to die; he works and works and works, there is no stopping him, because he is no longer afraid of anyone, or anything. He has no longer anything to lose, and so in this short time gains everything; and then dies, in the snow, swinging on a child’s swing in the park which he has made, and singing.”

Each of us lives most fully “on the wire,” in the face of death, daring to do the very thing which fear prevents us from.

A few years ago a family of hire wire artists had a terrible fall from the high wire, in the middle of the performance. All of them were killed or maimed, except the father, who escaped with broken legs. But even after losing all his children in the fall, a few months later he was back to work, in the circus, on the wire again.

Someone asked him in an interview, how could he bring himself to do it, after such a terrible accident. He answered: “On the wire, that’s living … all the rest is waiting.”

Of course for most of us it is not quite so literal.

The fear which prevents us from being ourselves, from being that one person unique in all the world, from coming to life -- that may mean nothing greater than the fear of giving up the image of a certain job, an image of a certain kind of family life.

One man can be as free in lighting up a cigarette, as that old man dancing on the wire. Another travelling with the gypsies. A handkerchief around your head; a horsedrawn yellow caravan, pulled up in a field; a rabbit stew simmering and bubbling outside the caravan, licking and sucking your fingers as you eat spoonfuls of the stew.

It has above all to do with the elements.

The wind, the soft rain; sitting on the back of an old truck moving clothes and baskets of old possessions while the gentle rain is falling, laughing, crouching, under a shawl to keep from getting wet. Eating a loaf of bread, torn in pieces, hunks of cheese cut crudely with a hatchet which is lying in the corner; red flowers glistening in the rain alongside the road; banging on the window of the truck to shout some joke.

Nothing to keep. Nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, an no concern about security; in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else: there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people around you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people’s ridicule, no subtle train of fears which can connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain.

And it happens when our inner forces are resolved.

And when a person’s forces are resolved, it makers us feel at home, because we know by some sixth sense, that there are no other unexpected forces lurking underground. He acts according to the nature of the situations he is in, without distorting them. There are no guiding images in his behavior, no hidden forces; he is simply free. And so, we feel relaxed and peaceful in his company. Of course, in practice we often don’t know what our inner forces might be.

We live, for months, for years, acting in a certain way, not knowing whether we are free or not, doubting, not even sure when we are successfully resolved, and when we aren’t.

Yet still there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly – when all over forces are resolved.

A woman can often see these moments in us, better than a man, better than we ourselves even.

When we know these moments, when we smile, when we let go, when we are not on guard at all – these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it – for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie; and how they can be loosed.

We cannot be aware of these most precious moments when they are actually happening.

In fact, the conscious effort to attain this quality, or to be free, or to be anything, the glance which this creates, will always spoil it.

It is, instead, when we forget ourselves completely, playing the fool perhaps among a group of friends, our swimming out to sea, or walking simply, or trying to finish something later at night over a table with a group of friends, cigarette stuck in the lower lip, eyes tired, earnest concentration.

All these moments in my own life – I only know them now, in retrospect.

Yet each of us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us.

It is the time when we are most right, most just, most sad, most hilarious.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

More here.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World

What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the 

middle of the night and

sing?

Happy Birthday, Tommaso Campanella

Cozza, Portrait of Campanella, 1650

The world's the book where the eternal sense

Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where, 

Painting his very self, with figures fair

He filled the whole immense circumference.

Tommaso Campanella, born on this day in 1568

Choice.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

The next hard time is just as real to him as the last, and so is the next blessing. The new ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is what it is. It is less humble, more foolish and frivolous, more dangerous. A man, Old Jack thinks, has no choice but to be ignorant, but he does not have to be a fool. He can know his place, and he can stay in it and be faithful.

Wendell Berry, from The Memory of Old Jack

Happy Birthday, François-René de Chateaubriand

Guérin, François-René de Chateaubriand, n/d

Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns, incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it.

François-René de Chateaubriand, born on this day in 1768 

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Tinge.

Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender: September, 1579

The SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR: SEPTEMBER

Harvest awakes the morning still

And toils rude groups the valleys fill

Deserted is each cottage hearth

To all life save the crickets mirth

Each burring wheel their sabbath meets

Nor walks a gossip in the streets

The bench beneath its eldern bough

Lined oer with grass is empty now

Where blackbirds caged from out the sun

Could whistle while their mistress spun.

All haunt the thronged fields still to share

The harvests lingering bounty there

As yet no meddling boys resort

About the streets in idle sport

The butterflye enjoys his hour

And flirts unchaced from flower to flower

And humming bees that morning calls

From out the low huts mortar walls

Which passing boy no more controuls

Flye undisturbed about their holes

And sparrows in glad chirpings meet

Unpelted in the quiet street

None but imprison'd childern now

Are seen where dames with angry brow

Threaten each younker to his seat

That thro' the school door eyes the street

Or from his horn book turns away

To mourn for liberty and play

Loud are the mornings early sounds

That farm and cottage yard surrounds

The creaking noise of opening gate

And clanking pumps where boys await

With idle motion to supply

The thirst of cattle crowding bye

The low of cows and bark of dogs

And cackling hens and wineing hogs

Swell high-while at the noise awoke

Old goody seeks her milking cloak

And hastens out to milk the cow

And fill the troughs to feed the sow

Or seeking old hens laid astray

Or from young chickens drives away

The circling kite that round them flyes

Waiting the chance to seize the prize

Hogs trye thro gates the street to gain

And steal into the fields of grain

From nights dull prison comes the duck

Waddling eager thro the muck

Squeezing thro the orchard pales

Where mornings bounty rarely fails

Eager gobbling as they pass

Dew worms thro the padded grass

Where blushing apples round and red

Load down the boughs and pat the head

Of longing maid that hither goes

To hang on lines the drying cloaths

Who views them oft with tempted eye

And steals one as she passes bye

Where the holly oak so tall

Far oer tops the garden wall

That latest blooms for bees provide

Hived on stone benches close beside

The bees their teazing music hum

And threaten war to all that come

Save the old dame whose jealous care

Places a trapping bottle there

Filled with mock sweets in whose disguise

The honey loving hornet dies

Upon the dovecoats mossy slates

The piegons coo around their mates

Where morns sunbeams early fall

By the barn or stable wall

Basking hens in playfull rout

Flap the smoaking dust about

In the barn hole sits the cat

Watching within the thirsty rat

Who oft at morn its dwelling leaves

To drink the moisture from the eves

The redbreast with his nimble eye

Dare scarcely stop to catch the flye

That tangled in the spiders snare

Mourns in vain for freedom there

The dog beside the threshold lyes

Mocking sleep with half shut eyes

With head crouched down upon his feet

Till strangers pass his sunny seat

Then quick he pricks his ears to hark

And bustles up to growl and bark

While boys in fear stop short their song

And sneak on hurrys fears along

And beggar creeping like a snail

To make his hungry hopes prevail

Oer the warm heart of charity

Leaves his lame halt and hastens bye

The maid afield now leaves the farm

With brimming bottles on her arm

Loitering unseen in narrow lane

To be oertook by following swain

Who happy thus her truth to prove

Carrys the load and talks of love

Full soon the harvest waggons sound

Rumbling like thunder all around

In ceasless speed the corn to load

Hurrying down the dusty road

While driving boy with eager eye

Watches the church clock passing bye

Whose gilt hands glitter in the sun

To see how far the hours have run

Right happly in the breathless day

To see it wearing fast away

Yet now and then a sudden shower

Will bring to toil a resting hour

When under sheltering shocks a crowd

Of merry voices mingle loud

Wearing the short lived boon along

With vulgar tale and merry song

Draining with leisures laughing eye

Each welcome bubbling bottle drye

Till peeping suns dry up the rain

Then off they start to toil again

Anon the fields are wearing clear

And glad sounds hum in labours ear

When childern halo 'here they come

And run to meet the harvest home

Stuck thick with boughs and thronged with boys

Who mingle loud a merry noise

Glad that the harvests end is nigh

And weary labour nearly bye

Where when they meet the stack thronged yard

Cross bunns or pence their shouts reward

Then comes the harvest supper night

Which rustics welcome with delight

When merry game and tiresome tale

And songs increasing with the ale

Their mingled uproar interpose

To crown the harvests happy close

While rural mirth that there abides

Laughs till she almost cracks her sides

Now harvests busy hum declines

And labour half its help resigns

Boys glad at heart to play return

The shepherds to their peace sojourn

Rush-bosomed solitudes among

Which busy toil disturbed so long

The gossip happy all is oer

Visits again her neighbours door

For scandals idle tales to dwell

Which harvest had no time to tell

And on each bench at even tide

Which trailing vine leaves nearly hide

And free from all its sultry strife

Enjoy once more their idle life

A few whom waning toil reprieves

Thread the forests sea of leaves

Where the pheasant loves to hide

And the darkest glooms abide

Beneath the old oaks mossd and grey

Whose shadows seem as old as they

Where time hath many seasons won

Since aught beneath them saw the sun.

Within these brambly solitudes

The ragged noisy boy intrudes

To gather nuts that ripe and brown

As soon as shook will patter down

Thus harvest ends its busy reign

And leaves the fields their peace again

Where autumns shadows idly muse

And tinge the trees with many hues

Amid whose scenes I'm feign to dwell

And sing of what I love so well

But hollow winds and tumbling floods

And humming showers and moaning woods

All startle into sudden strife

And wake a mighty lay to life

Making amid their strains divine

All songs in vain so mean as mine

John Clare

Happy Birthday, Sarah Orne Jewett

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.  

It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.

Sarah Orne Jewett, born on this day in 1849, from her book, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Wise.

On this day in 1901, in a speech at the Minnesota State Fair, then Vice President Thedore Roosevelt gave us wise words to live by ...

Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far. If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power. In private life there are few things more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his position becomes absolutely contemptible. So it is with the nation. It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples.

Released.

R.E.M. released Document on this day in 1987.

"King of Birds"...

Home.

As Kurt said to me earlier today, "You CAN and OUGHT to go home."

Amen.

Here.

Wendell Berry, Rest in Peace

Wendell Berry has passed.

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Thanks, Ors.

Image.

Kurt's been Up North ...

Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all.

Bruce Catton, from Waiting for the Morning Train

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. 

Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. 

Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. 

The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world ...

Words often bring with them the illusion of transparency, as though they allowed us to understand everything, control everything, put everything in order. Modernity is talkative because it is proud, unless the converse is true. Is our incessant talking perhaps what makes us proud?

Cardinal Robert Sarah, from The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

Voice.

Interesting people often write down their thoughts in a notebook. I am very attracted by this literary genre which is the diary, or even more prosaically scattered notes written from day to day. As if things were no longer related to each other, there are only almost surreal notations left. I feel very close to this writing style today; I now realize that things never stick together and that it is up to us to pick up the pieces of a reality that constantly eludes us. When I wrote my Dalva notebooks, I couldn't count on anything except on earth, the sun, the moon and the stars. That’s all I have. You can never count on a city. On the other hand, a tree or a river will never let you down. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg speaks of “this incredible street music”, I think that if you put aside your personality, you will be more receptive to this music. The most important thing I’ve done in seven years - my life is moving in cycles of seven years - is to have abandoned my personality. Only your voice counts and, if you manage to preserve it, you have a chance to escape the torments and lamentations of everyday life. As long as I keep my voice, I know that I will never be one of those lost guys who don't know what to do with their lives.

Jim Harrison

Happy Birthday, Jacques-Louis David

David, Self-Portrait, 1794

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself. The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

Jacques-Louis David, born on this day in 1748

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Fraser

Elizabeth Fraser was born on this day in 1958.

"Wax and Wane" with The Cocteau Twins ...

Now.

On this day in 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

An excerpt ...

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Hang.

'Tis the first full week of school and cocktail hour.  Summer, mercifully, is coming to a close.  The Oyster Months are just days away and, by God, the weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."     

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this: RUSH, "In the End/In the Mood"" ...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Happy Birthday, Alex Lifeson

Alex Lifeson was born on this day in 1953.

"Xanadu" ...

Will.

In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

Aldous Huxley, from The Doors of Perception

... but it will.

Happy Birthday, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Schlesinger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1831

The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born on this day 1770