Happy Birthday, Adam Smith

Unknown, Adam Smith, The Muir Portait, 1801

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.

Adam Smith, born on this day in 1723, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments

I wonder what Mr. Smith's thoughts on the blogopolooza would've been.

Lute.

Hopkinson Smith performs a program of French and Italian lute music ...

Bowie, "The Last Thing You Should Do"

Close your eyes ...

Searches.

Teniers, The Younger, Philosopher Reading, 1666

RIME

O scholar grey, with quiet eyes,

Reading the charactered pages, bright

With one tall candle’s flickering light,

In a turret chamber under the skies;

O scholar, learned in gramarye,

Have you seen the manifold things I see?

Have you seen the forms of tracèd towers

Whence clamorous voices challenge the hours:

Gaunt tree-branches, pitchy black

Against the long, wind-driven wrack

Of scurrying, shuddering clouds, that race

Ever across the pale moon’s face?

Have you heard the tramp of hurrying feet.

There beneath, in the shadowy street,

Have you heard sharp cries, and seen the flame

Of silvery steel, in a perilous game,

A perilous game for men to play,

Hid from the searching eyes of day?

Have you heard the great awakening breath,

Like trump that summons the saints from death,

Of the wild, majestical wind, which blows

Loud and splendid, that each man knows

Far, O far away is the sea,

Breaking, murmuring, stark and free?

All these things I hear and see,

I, a scholar of gramarye:

All are writ in the ancient books

Clear, exactly, and he that looks

Finds the night and the changing sea,

The years gone by, and the years to be:

(He that searches, with tireless eyes

In a turret-chamber under the skies)

Passion and joy, and sorrow and laughter,

Life and death, and the things thereafter.

Geoffrey Bache Smith

Believer.

Smith, Carl Sandburg, 1961

What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from the earth or a sunken glass house on the sea-bottom amid fish and feather-stars unless a bet that man can shove on beyond yesterday's record of man the hoper, the believer?

Carl Sandburg

Released.

Siouxsie & The Banshees released A Kiss in the Dreamhouse on this day in 1982.

"Painted Bird"...

Remembers.

Smith, Carl Sandburg, 1961

Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner—a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.       

And I ask no better a winding sheet

                             (over the earth and under the sun.) 

Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.     

Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey—who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets? 

In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.

Carl Sandburg

Happy Birthday, Smith

Robert Smith was born on this day in 1959.

"Play for Today" ...

Start.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

SECRECY, or HOW to be INVISIBLE

Society does not understand the concept of unplanned time or non-planning.  You may be criticized, judged, or ridiculed for your activities.  This is best avoided altogether.

No one needs to know about your wanderings.  It is okay to have something that is just yours.

Your thoughts are powerful and need time to emerge without distractions.  This can only be done in solitary fashion.

Wandering is an ancient and powerful tool.  When you you wander you are connecting to a group of great thinkers who used this tool to further humankind and for good.  This path is not for everyone.  You are entrusted with the knowledge of its power and should only pass on this knowledge to others who are able to honor it.

Secrecy allows members to conduct research quietly and covertly.

She had the added sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown.

Virginia Woolf     

Keri Smith, from The Wander Society 

Smith, Nunc Dimittus

VOCES8 performs ...

Dowland, "Mrs. White's Nothing"

Hopkinson Smith performs ...

Arms.

We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.

Patti Smith, from Just Kids

Paul Smith, Nunc Dimittus

Performed by VOCES8 ...

Excellent.

Excellent (and sixth grader-approved) albums ...

Could.

Uncursed.

On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic

Is there a solitary wretch who hies

   To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,

And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes

   Its distance from the waves that chide below;

Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs

   Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,

With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies

   Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?

In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,

   I see him more with envy than with fear;

He has no nice felicities that shrink

   From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,

He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

Charlotte Smith