Pleasure.

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—

But the least motion which they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

William Wordsworth

John Hartford, "Old Time River Man"

And they light their pipes and go off in the night
Or was that fireflies instead?

Sublime.

Unknown, Jimmy Buffett and Willie Nelson, 1975

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Socrates

Grand.

Clark/Lewis, S., A Map of Lewis and Clarks' Track Across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to The Pacific Ocean; by Order of the Executive of the United States in 1804, 5 & 6, 1814

On this day in 1804, Lewis and Clark began their grand camping trip.

CONNECT

Rossini, The Barber of Saville

The St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Yuri Temirkanov, perform the overture ...

Birdsong is the perfect accompaniment.

Rick's.

Weyl, Rick's Cafe Americain, 1943

Happy.

Happy Friday!

Willie Nelson, "Me and Paul"

HAPPY FRIDAY!

Appropriately.

Anonymous, Michel de Montaigne, 1590

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most. If you walk on stilts, you're still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you're still sitting on your ass.

Michel de Montaigne

Open.

Chatham, Summer Moon Rising, 2012

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Ocean water begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its

face against mine, Breathe into me, Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon won't use the door, only the window.

Rumi

Duty.

Rights are equal and universal and are the way in which the sovereignty of the individual is fitted into the same slot, as it were, as the sovereignty of the state.

Few doubt, therefore, the importance of the idea and all that it has inspired in the way of constitution building.  It is the foundation stone of the liberal order, and for Popper, as for many others, the way to release reason into the community, and to produce a society open to innovation and experiment.

However, we should not neglect the difficulties associated with the human rights idea of which two in particular stand out as especially relevant to the times in which we live.

First, what exactly are our rights?  How are rights distinguished from mere interests and desires?  What prevents people from claiming as a right what they just happen to want, regardless of the effect on the common good?

Secondly, what are our duties and to whom or to what are our duties owed?  The American Declaration of Independence told us that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That relatively innocuous summary leaves open as many questions as it answers, and when Eleanor Roosevelt set out to draft the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the list began to grow in ways that the American founders might very well have questioned.  Human rights which began life as basic freedoms  soon began to include elaborate claims to health, work, security, family life, and so on, which are available only if someone is prepared to provide them.  That which was conceived as a limitation to the power of the state, soon became a way of increasing that power, to the point where the state as guardian and provider occupies more and more of the space once allocated to the free acts of individuals. 

We have seen this process of rights inflation everywhere in the post-war world, and much of it issues either from declarations, such as that of the United Nations or from the courts, established to adjudicate our rights under this or that treaty.  The expansion of rights goes hand-in-hand with a contraction of duties.  The universalist vision of the Enlightenment conceives duties as owed indifferently to all mankind.  We have a general duty to do good, the beneficiaries of which are not bound to us by specific obligations, but are simply equal petitioners for a benefit that cannot, in fact, be distributed to them all.  No particular person comes before us as the irreplaceable object of our concern.  All are equal and none have an overriding claim.  In such circumstances I can easily be forgiven if I neglect them all, being unable to fulfill a duty that will, in any case, make little difference to the net sum of human happiness.

Sir Roger Scruton

Magic.

Rockwell, Boy Reading an Adventure Story, 1923

I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul- filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is! Your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are done, and you lie out upon the topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap of the sail into the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. What a magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and mind! Long ere I came to my teens I had traversed every sea and knew the Rockies like my own back garden. How often had I sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo and so escaped him! It was an everyday emergency to have to set the prairie on fire in front of me in order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a mile down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. I had creased horses, I had shot down rapids, I had strapped on my moccasins hindforemost to conceal my tracks, I had lain under water with a reed in my mouth, and I had feigned madness to escape the torture. As to the Indian braves whom I slew in single combats, I could have stocked a large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though I was a good deal chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it and I was always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young squaw. It was all more real than the reality. Since those days I have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was flat compared with the first time that I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Stan Getz, "I Can't Get Started"

Refuge.

Poetry is an art of sound as much as an art of the printed word. The great work of poetry is to help us become free artists of ourselves. That work requires us to hear, and not merely to read, the poetry.

This process is also immensely important to the training and preparation of the mind. It was essential to the old tradition in education, a tradition to which we bid farewell in our graduate schools in the sixties. Now we live in an age of distraction, an age dominated by bombardment coming from the screen. Poetry, the process of making poetry your own, can be a refuge from that bombardment. But it’s also an essential disciplining of the mind, preparing one to think and speak critically and well.

Harold Bloom

Greatest.

Was 1978 the greatest year in music?

CONNECT

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Loosen.

"Fairy stories," Pullman says, sitting on the sofa in his comfortable Oxfordshire farmhouse, "loosen the chains of the imagination. They give you things to think with – images to think with – and the sense that all kinds of things are possible. While at the same time being ridiculous or terrifying or consolatory. Or something else altogether, as well."

Philip Pullman

CONNECT

Teaches.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Harold Bloom

Responds.

Thank you, Wrath of Gnon.

Captured.

Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys captured the British-held Fort Ticonderoga on this day in 1775.

Inspiration.

Doisneau, The Old District of Lille, 1951

“Genius,” Baudelaire observes, “is none other than childhood formulated with precision.” I believe that the great French décadent, who was writing here about the equally decadent English essayist Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, intended the word “genius” to be understood in this context as the “daimon,” which the ancient Greeks believed is in every man: his character, indeed his essence. If Baudelaire is correct, then in a sense childhood never ends, but exists in us not merely as a memory or complex of memories, but as an essential part of what we intrinsically are. Every artist knows the truth of this since, for the artist, childhood and the childhood conception of things is a deep source of what used to be called inspiration, if for no other reason than that it was as children that we first apprehended the world as mystery. The process of growing up is, sadly, a process of turning the mysterious into the mundane. We cease to be amazed by things— the sky, the turning of the seasons, love, other people — only because we have grown accustomed to them.

John Banville

Transcontinental.

The Transcontinental Railroad was completed on this day in 1869.

Drawing on his extensive knowledge on the American West and 12 years of research on the railroads, Dr. Richard White reveals the social and economic impact the transcontinental railroad has had on shaping the United States into what it is today.

Floyd.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy birthday, Yzerman.

The Captain, Steve Yzerman, was born on this day in 1965 ...

Crowned.

Roger Scruton sings of wine's place in civilization ...

As a writer and philosopher I owe much to wine. Those long days before a blank page, attempting to capture the thoughts that hover just out of reach like captious flies, have almost always been crowned by some small success when, at 7.30, I pour myself a glass of white Burgundy. However badly the day has gone, the words will then begin to gather into sentences.

CONNECT

Not.

Over.

Tuesday 8 May 1945 was Victory in Europe (VE) Day, and it marked the formal conclusion of Hitler's war. With it came the end of six years of misery, suffering, courage and endurance across the world.

CONNECT

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Respighi, Adagio con variazioni, for Cello & Orchestra, P. 133

Misha Maisky, cello ...

Delight.

Any education that neglects the experience of delight will be a dry and tasteless diet with no nourishment in it.

Philip Pullman

Happy birthday, Johnson.

Robert Johnson was born on this day in 1911.

Eric Clapton, "Me and the Devil" ...

Bingo, "All You Want to Do is Dance"

See.

Vermeer, The Astronomer (detail), 1668

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust

Important.

Bon Appétit has the 25 most important cheeses in America.

CONNECT

Thank you, Jessica.

Botany.

Practice.

Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner.

Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop.

Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy.

See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Suddenly.

Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1857

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Ray Bradbury, from Farewell Summer

Attain.

The BUILDERS

All are architects of Fate,

 Working in these walls of Time;

Some with massive deeds and great,

 Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;

 Each thing in its place is best;

And what seems but idle show

 Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,

 Time is with materials filled;

Our to-days and yesterdays

 Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;

 Leave no yawning gaps between;

Think not, because no man sees,

 Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,

 Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

 For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,

 Both the unseen and the seen;

Make the house, where Gods may dwell,

 Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,

 Standing in these walls of Time,

Broken stairways, where the feet

 Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,

 With a firm and ample base;

And ascending and secure

 Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain

 To those turrets, where the eye

Sees the world as one vast plain,

 And one boundless reach of sky.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Invents.

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

Gary Snyder 

Happy birthday, Brahms.

Johannes Brahms was born on this day in 1833.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

Johannes Brahms

Jukka Pekka Saraste leads the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln - Kölner Philharmonie in Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 ...

Still.

You are the bread and the knife,

The crystal goblet and the wine…

Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker,

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,

or the house of cards.

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner

nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman’s tea cup.

But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.

You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Billy Collins

Decide.

HOW to BUILD an OWL

1.   Decide you must.

2.   Develop deep respect

  for feather, bone, claw.

3.   Place your trembling thumb

  where the heart will be:

 for one hundred hours watch

 so you will know

  where to put the first feather.

4.   Stay awake forever.

  When the bird takes shape

 gently pry open its beak

  and whisper into it: mouse.

5.   Let it go.

Kathleen Lynch

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Stay.

Rubbish.

The Cars, "Dangerous Type"

Paradise.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

May.