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?

Study.

James Prosek wades the introspective waters of Izaak Walton in his documentary, The Complete Angler ...

When I'm on the small Connecticut brooks of my youth, I want to be innocent again. I think of sleepouts and thick pine forests, clear running water, garden worms, diminutive flies, and first kisses with a freckle-faced girl.  These are my best memories, along with days angling for wild trout.  The brook, with all its colors and sounds, is an education, a place where I can learn about myself and other creatures, as well. 

Without even realizing it, it is in my early years of fishing I began to follow Isaac Walton's first philosophy: study to be quiet. 

Happy Birthday, Ian Anderson

Ian Anderson was born on this day in 1947.

"The Secret Language of Birds"...

Rare.

The best books look like they've been run over by a truck, but they have to been run over by the right truck.  As a general matter, rare is rare for a reason and it's not because everybody in the world wants it.  Usually the people who appreciate something rare in the realm of books are just as rare as the the things themselves, usually.

Alive.

A new documentary on Geogia O'Keeffe has been released ...

... the forces that keep us alive.

Weather.

In June 1944, the success of the greatest military invasion the world had ever seen depended on weather readings taken by one woman, Maureen Sweeney ...

Happy Birthday, John Constable

Constable, Cloud Study, 1822

Light – dews – breezes – bloom – and freshness; not one of which has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world. Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments? We see nothing truly until we understand it.

John Constable, born on this day in 1776

Constable: A Country Rebel ...

Happy Birthday, J.M.W. Turner

Turner, Study for Sea and Sky, Isle of Wight, 1827

I have no secret but hard work. This is a secret that many never learn, and they don't succeed because they don't learn it. Labor is the genius that changes the world from ugliness to beauty, and the great curse to a great blessing.  I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, born on this day in 1775.

The Genius of Turner: Painting The Industrial Revolution ...

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost

Eisenstaedt, Robert Frost at His Desk, 1955

The SOUND of TREES

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place?

We suffer them by the day

Till we lose all measure of pace,

And fixity in our joys,

And acquire a listening air.

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay.

My feet tug at the floor

And my head sways to my shoulder

Sometimes when I watch trees sway,

From the window or the door.

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

Robert Frost, born on this day in 1874.

A Lover's Quarrel with the World ...

Happy Birthday, Nicolaus Copernicus

Anonymous, Nicolaus Copernicus, The "Toruń Portrait", 1580

Nicolaus Copernicus was born this week in 1473 and his thoughts provided our Creative Writing class with some of the year's best discussion so far ...

To be intelligent is to be able to see the hidden connections between things.  To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge ... I am not so enamoured of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them.

Eli, The Insightful, said, "Mr. Firchau, he said this a long time ago and people still haven't figured it out." 

A conversation about the importance of putting your name on your paper was had based on the painting's attribution.

Copernicus and His World ...

Different.

Miracle: The Boys of '80 comes out tomorrow.

Our approach to the game was gonna be entirely different ...

Oddly.

Dali said, "To daze is to think" ...

Time inevitably figures in stargazing, since everything we see in the night sky belongs to the past. This relationship is embodied in the "light year," a standard cosmic yardstick defined as the distance light, moving through the vacuum of space at 186,000 miles per second, travels in one year—nearly six trillion miles. We see the Moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, bright stars as they were decades to centuries ago, and galaxies as they were millions of years ago. To confront light older than the human species and even the Earth may be disconcerting at first—big time, like big space, making the us feel inconsequential by comparison—but in the end it can be oddly reassuring to consider the fleeting span of human life in a cosmic context. We may be only actors strutting on a stage, but the stage is big and the play has been going on for a very long time.

Better.

Georges Luneau's documentary on Jim Harrison, Between Dog and Wolf ...

I'm now 55 and I've been doing this for 50 years, in half a century, I've been going into the woods and the thickets since I was a little boy.  After I hurt my eye, I was blinded in my left eye, I think I retreated from the world to the world of thickets.  So I started sleeping outside a lot when was a little boy, usually with my dog, whatever dog, at the same time.  I felt much happier sleeping out in the forest, especially in the summer, obviously.  Perhaps someday I think I will even die splaying out by a fire under the stars, which is a much better way to live perhaps ...

Happy Birthday, Andrea Palladio

Palladio, Study for Baths of Agrippa, 1550

Beauty will result from the form and the correspondence of the whole, with respect to the several parts, of the parts with regard to each other, and of these again to the whole; that the structure may appear an entire and complete body, wherein each member agrees with the other, and all necessary to compose what you intend to form.

Andrea Palladio, born on this date in 1508

PALLADIO: The Architect and His Influence in America ...

From.

Hillsdale College just released a new documentary series, Colonial America: From Wilderness to Civilization. The course examines how the experiences of the American colonists shaped America’s character and habits of self-government ...

Wonder.

Part-Time Explorer has released a documentary on Big Fitz ...

And I just wonder if those two seas didn't catch up with the Fitzgerald.

Happy Birthday, Charles Follen McKim

McKim, Mead & White, Isaac Bell House, 1889

Charles Follen McKim was born on this day in 1847.

Charles Follen McKim: Creating an Architecture for America ...

Happy Birthday, Robert Mills

Mills, Old Patent Office Building, Model Room, 1865

Robert Mills was born on this day in 1781.

A South Carolina Educational Television documentary on Mills' life and work ...

Quiet.

A quiet, unnoticed, one-man vigil, a direct-action of stillness ...

Vocabulary.

From Bill Moyers' 1988 documentary, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, this is an expert from episode two, "The Message of the Myth" ...

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Boddhisattva. The Bodhisattva, the one whose being, satra, is illumination, bodhi, who realizes his identity with eternity, and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder, and come back and participate in it. “All life is sorrowful,” is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow, loss, loss, loss.

BILL MOYERS: That’s a pessimistic note.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I mean, you got to say yes to it and say it’s great this way. I mean, this is the way God intended it.

BILL MOYERS: You don’t really believe that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, this is the way it is, and I don’t believe anybody intended it, but this is the way it is. And Joyce’s wonderful line, you know, “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid and to recognize, as I did in my conversation with that Hindu guru or teacher that I told you of, that all of this as it is, is as it has to be, and it is a manifestation of the eternal presence in the world. The end of things always is painful; pain is part of there being a world at all.

BILL MOYERS: But if one accepted that isn’t the ultimate conclusion, to say, well, "I won’t try to reform any laws or fight any battles."

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I didn’t say that.

BILL MOYERS: Isn’t that the logical conclusion one could draw, though, the philosophy of nihilism?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s not the necessary thing to draw. You could say I will participate in this row, and I will join the army, and I will go to war.

BILL MOYERS: I’ll do the best I can on Earth.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I will participate in the game. It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts. And that wonderful Irish saying, you know, “Is this a private fight, or can anybody get into it?” This is the way life is, and the hero is the one who can participate in it decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, revenge or anything of the kind.

Let me tell you one story here, of a samurai warrior, a Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. And he actually, after some time, found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. And he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in his face. And the samurai sheathed the sword and walked away. Why did he do that?

BILL MOYERS: Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man then, it would have a personal act, of another kind of act, that’s not what he had come to do.

BILL MOYERS: Let me tell you what happens to me when I read these stories, no matter the culture of their origin. I feel first this sense of wonder at the spectacle of the human imagination, simply groping to try to understand this existence. Does that ever happen to you?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I tell you, mythology I think of as the homeland of the Muses, the inspirers of poetry. And to see life as a poem, and yourself participating in a poem, is what the myth does for you.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean, a poem?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I mean a vocabulary in the form, not of words, but of acts and adventures, which is connotative, which connotes something transcendent of the action here and which yet informs the whole thing, so that you always feel in accord with the universal being.