Result.

Stuart, Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1805

The general objects of this law are to provide an education adapted to the years, to the capacity, and the condition of every one, and directed to their freedom and happiness. Specific details were not proper for the law. These must be the business of the visitors entrusted with its execution. The first stage of this education being the schools of the hundreds, wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction, the principal foundations of future order will be laid here. Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history. The first elements of morality too may be instilled into their minds; such as, when further developed as their judgments advance in strength, may teach them how to work out their own greatest happiness, by shewing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.--Those whom either the wealth of their parents or the adoption of the state shall destine to higher degrees of learning, will go on to the grammar schools, which constitute the next stage, there to be instructed in the languages. The learning Greek and Latin, I am told, is going into disuse in Europe. I know not what their manners and occupations may call for: but it would be very ill-judged in us to follow their example in this instance. There is a certain period of life, say from eight to fifteen or sixteen years of age, when the mind, like the body, is not yet firm enough for laborious and close operations. If applied to such, it falls an early victim to premature exertion; exhibiting indeed at first, in these young and tender subjects, the flattering appearance of their being men while they are yet children, but ending in reducing them to be children when they should be men. The memory is then most susceptible and tenacious of impressions; and the learning of languages being chiefly a work of memory, it seems precisely fitted to the powers of this period, which is long enough too for acquiring the most useful languages antient and modern. I do not pretend that language is science. It is only an instrument for the attainment of science. But that time is not lost which is employed in providing tools for future operation: more especially as in this case the books put into the hands of the youth for this purpose may be such as will at the same time impress their minds with useful facts and good principles. If this period be suffered to pass in idleness, the mind becomes lethargic and impotent, as would the body it inhabits if unexercised during the same time. The sympathy between body and mind during their rise, progress and decline, is too strict and obvious to endanger our being misled while we reason from the one to the other.--As soon as they are of sufficient age, it is supposed they will be sent on from the grammar schools to the university, which constitutes our third and last stage, there to study those sciences which may be adapted to their views.--By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.--But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved to a certain degree.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Queries 14 and 19, 1784

Rainbow, "Do You Close Your Eyes"

Desire.

Teaches.

Francis Mallmann teaches on YesChef ...

Thank you, Jessica.

Doorways.

From Luke Sherlock's top ten English church doorways ...

April Wine, “Enough is Enough”

DEVIL OUT!

Introduced.

The world was introduced to The Jam on this day in 1977.

Side one, track one of In the City, here's "Art School" ...

Beyond.

Susan Magsamen: "Leveraging the Arts to Service The Human Brain" ...

Our brains carry the signature of our artistic experiences. Following the tracks of aesthetic experiences all the way to its biological imprint in the brain takes an interdisciplinary approach. This is why the field of neuroarts is developing scientific frameworks and methods, such as the impact thinking method, to foster a marriage between the arts and the sciences.

Think of the impact thinking method as the scientific method, but as played by an orchestra. Where traditional science identifies a specific problem to solve and builds upon its findings, neuroarts identifies all the key players that make up an artistic experience and translates the effects of this symphony of sensory experience immediately to our health, well-being, and learning.

Every time you read poetry, listen to music, see a film, explore new architecture, or dance, you are biologically changed. Engaging with art sparks an emotional release that Aristotle called catharsis. Cultures everywhere have developed rituals and customs using art – singing, dancing, expressive writing, drawing, and storytelling – to facilitate catharsis. But the benefits of the arts and aesthetic experiences extend to other areas of our physical and mental health beyond catharsis.

Have.

Eric Hoffer on power's pestilence ...

It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals. You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are “vowed” to the service of mankind, yet can function only by pitting neighbor against neighbor. The all-seeing eye of a totalitarian regime is usually the watchful eye of the next-door neighbor.

The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day. He wants a society throbbing with dedication, reverence, and worship. He sees it as scandalous that the discoveries of science and the feats of heroes should have as their denouement the comfort and affluence of common folk.

The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

The significant point is that people unfit for freedom—who cannot do much with it—are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a “have-not” type of self. If Hitler had had the talents and the temperament of a genuine artist, if Stalin had had the capacity to become a first-rate theoretician, if Napoleon had had the makings of a great poet or philosopher they would hardly have developed the all-consuming lust for absolute power.

The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history. Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.

No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion—it is an evil government.

From 1967, Eric Sevareid interviews Hoffer who extols the common man and warns about intellectuals seeking to rule.

"The Passionate State of Mind" ...

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Flourish.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish! 

William Blake

Andy Rourke, Rest in Peace

Andy Rourke has passed.

"Some Girls are Bigger than Others" ...

Singing.

Klimt, Tranquil Pond (Egelsee near Golling, Salzburg), 1899

These, I, singing in spring, collect for lovers,

(For who but I should understand lovers, and all their sorrow and joy?

And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)

Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world—but soon I pass the gates,

Now along the pond-side—now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,

Now by the post-and-rail fences, where the old stones thrown there, pick’d from the fields, have accumulated,

(Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones, and partly cover them—Beyond these I pass,)

Far, far in the forest, before I think where I go,

Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,

Alone I had thought—yet soon a troop gathers around me,

Some walk by my side, and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,

They, the spirits of dear friends, dead or alive—thicker they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,

Collecting, dispensing, singing in spring, there I wander with them,

Plucking something for tokens—tossing toward whoever is near me;

Here! lilac, with a branch of pine,

Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in Florida, as it hung trailing down,

Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,

And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pondside,

(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me—and returns again, never to separate from me,

And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades—this Calamus-root shall,

Interchange it, youths, with each other! Let none render it back!)

And twigs of maple, and a bunch of wild orange, and chestnut,

And stems of currants, and plum-blows, and the aromatic cedar:

These, I, compass’d around by a thick cloud of spirits,

Wandering, point to, or touch as I pass, or throw them loosely from me,

Indicating to each one what he shall have—giving something to each;

But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that I reserve,

I will give of it—but only to them that love, as I myself am capable of loving.

Walt Whitman

Happy Birthday, Rudd

Phil Rudd was born on this day in 1954.

"Problem Child," then ...

And now ...

Good morning!  What a glorious day!

Thin Lizzy, "Are You Ready"

Toto, "Goodbye Girl"

Unsettle.

Now wisdom and goodness are the aim of higher education, how can it be otherwise? Wisdom and goodness are the end of human life. If you dispute this, you are entering upon a metaphysical controversy; for you are disputing about the nature of being and the nature of man. This is as it should be. How can we consider man's destiny unless we ask what he is? How can we talk about preparing men for life unless we ask what the end of life may be? At the base of education, as at the base of every human activity, lies metaphysics.

If we can develop general education so that all advanced study will rest on a common body of knowledge, we may succeed in making our universities true communities and communities of true scholars.

If there are permanent studies which every person who wishes to call himself educated should master, then those studies should be at the center of a general education. They cannot be ignored because they are difficult, or unpleasant, or because they are almost totally missing from our curriculum today. The purpose of higher education is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects.

Robert M. Hutchins

Rush.

RUSH.

May 17, 1990.

Soundcheck ...

Plenitude.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Gaston Bachelard

Happy Birthday, Goldicutt

Goldicutt, Design for the Facade of a Town Building, Possibly a Club House: Elevation, 1829

John Goldicutt was born on this day in 1793.

Thank you, Dr. Kitchen.

Where.

Gotlib, Lilies, n/d

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

Jim Jarmusch

Nice.

If I had five million pounds I'd start a radio station because something needs to be done. It would be nice to turn on the radio and hear something that didn't make you feel like smashing up the kitchen and strangling the cat.

Joe Strummer

Juice.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Ernest Hemingway, from The Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction," No. 21

Happy Birthday, Satie

Erik Satie was born on this day in 1866.

Irina Kulikova performs Gnossienne No. 1 ...

Accept.

Perhaps play would be more respected if we called it something like “self-motivated practice of life skills," but that would remove the lightheartedness from it and thereby reduce its effectiveness. So we are stuck with the paradox. We must accept play’s triviality in order to realize its profundity.

Peter Gray, from Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

True.

Sargent, An Artist in His Studio, 1904

Yale Daily News asks, "Could AI elevate human creativity?"

Buck thinks that AI is changing how artists imagine what can be made, but would not replace the entirety of the design process. 

Rather than “replacing” human creativity, Buck views AI as “displacing” it. The architect described AI as a form of “mediation,” similar to other technologies like a pencil or paint, and software like Photoshop and 3D modeling. AI serves as a filter which humans “look through” and “create through,” Buck explained, and is already a part of cameras, software for editing photos, Google search and a variety of other platforms that affect how humans see the world.

“It’s not that it is or will replace human creativity but that it will change how humans are creative and how art is produced,” Buck said. “[AI is] another way in which what we make is filtered through all the different technologies we use.”

Nisheeth Vishnoi, A. Bartlett Giamatti professor of computer science and co-founder of the Computation and Society Initiative, thinks that AI could add to the creativity of human artists, “perhaps indirectly.” 

“It is likely that AI will discover new types of art forms which are visually appealing,” Vishnoi said. “However, the popularity of art, the price of art and artistic styles is a very human-driven process. And I’m not sure how AI itself is going to enter and capture that.”

Persuasion says, "Never."

Experience: not just the source of art but its very substance—what it’s made from, what it refers to, what it is tested against. It might be possible to code for low-probability choices, I guess, but how would the computer know if the results are worth a damn? Art is good insofar as we recognize it as true, as corresponding to our experience of the world, both inner and outer. But for AIs, there is neither experience nor world. No sights or sounds, no joys or pains, and also no awareness—no idea whether what they make is true, and therefore whether it is good.

Unknown.

Kenny Barron, "Embraceable You"

The Police, "Bring on the Night"

1979.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Forever.

National Photo Company, Lincoln Memorial with Marsh in Foreground, 1917

In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.

America.

Wells, North America, 1699

Satie, Je te veux

Kotaro Fukuma interprets ...

Nielsen, Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Op. 7

Here's the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schønwandt, proudly performing the first movement, Allegro orgoglioso ...

Enthusiasm.

Attack each day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.

Jim Harbaugh

Happy Birthday, Norgay

Tenzig Norgay was born on this day in 1914.

At 3:30 AM the two men began to brew up liquids for their summit push. First light allowed Tenzing to point out to Hillary the glowing Thyangboche Monastery in the valley far below and by 6:30 the pair had slung on their oxygen gear and set off up the ridge with Tenzing in the lead. On surpassing Tenzing and Lambert’s high point from the year before they began to encounter unconsolidated snow on the ridge. At 9 AM they reached the South Summit and were able to discard their empty twenty pound oxygen tanks and start on fresh cylinders. From here they found good snow conditions and continued toward the summit, stopping occasionally to clear ice from each others breathing tubes. Just below the summit they encountered a forty foot vertical section of rock. Hillary took the lead and through superhuman effort was able to labor up a chimney created between the rock and a vertical cornice of snow. Continuing on and carefully belaying each other one at a time they labored up the ridge. One hump of snow led to another and finally there was nothing beyond but the plains of Tibet fading toward the curved violet horizon. They were on the summit!

Hillary offered a congratulatory handshake to Tenzing but that was not sufficient. Tenzing threw himself at Hillary and gave him a hearty Sherpa hug. Hillary took some photos while Tenzing knelt down and buried a small pencil (given to him by his daughter Nima) and an offering of sweets in the summit snow, then he said a short prayer.

Standing up, Tenzing thought of Irvine and Mallory back in 1924 and scanned the summit for evidence of their attempt. Nothing. A gentle breeze caressed the climbers. On his head Tenzing wore the balaclava given to him by the crazy Earl Denman, around his neck was a scarf belonging to his great friend Raymond Lambert. His Swiss reindeer skin boots were on their third expedition and the wool socks that he wore were hand-knitted by his wife Ang Lahmu. He owed the entire sum of his expedition salary to friends back in Darjeeling.

Tenzing gazed down at his Solo Khumbu Valley where he had spent his childhood wondering at the far away summit on which he now stood. He marveled over the high pastures where he had grazed his father’s yaks as a child and knew that the Wheel had come full circle. For Tenzing Norgay it had been the shortest of distances, but a long journey indeed.

CONNECT

The BBC's documentary on Norgay's guiding of Sir Edmund Hillary to the summit of Everest in 1953, The Race for Everest ...

Jimmy Buffett, "That's What Living is to Me"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Blessings.

Ray Davies nails "Days" ...

Happy Mother's Day to my Mum and blessings to all moms and their families on this very special day.

Discovery.

Lewis (Samuel), Clark, Harrison, Samuel, Bradford and Inskeep, A map of Lewis and Clark's 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, 1814

A closer look at this beauty is HERE.

The greatest camping trip ever began on this date in 1804 when Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and The Corps of Discovery left St. Louis for the Pacific Ocean.

We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trod. The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. However, as the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the coloring to events, when the imagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life. 

Meriwether Lewis

An interactive map is HERE.

Stephen Ambrose's masterful storytelling makes Ken Burns' documentary, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery outstanding and inspiring ...

I was born at the wrong time.

Blondie, "Bang a Gong(Get it On)"

I love it when a cover is better than the original ...

Reconnoiter.

World service bulletin

From the nightshift D.J.

To all wavebands on Earth

Reconnoiter on the kilohertz

This tune is going out to Marconi

To all corners of the globe

There ain't no hut in the Serengeti

Where my wavelengths do not probe

Learning.

The biggest, most enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.

Dr. Peter Gray, from Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

Iggy Pop, "Shades"

Attitude.

Now you don't stop, that ain't true

Never said a word, I never had to

It was my attitude

That you thought was rude

Foster.

An excellent book ...

If freedom, personal responsibility, self-initiative, honesty, integrity, and concern for others rank high in your system of values, and if they represent characteristics you would like to see in your children, then you will want to be a trustful parent. None of these can be taught by lecturing, coercion, or coaxing. They are acquired or lost through daily life experiences that reinforce or suppress them. You can help your children build these values by living them yourself and applying them in your relationship with your children. Trust promotes trustworthiness. Self-initiative and all of the traits that depend on self-initiative can develop only under conditions of freedom.

Sadly, in many cases, the assumption that children are incompetent, irresponsible, and in need of constant direction and supervision becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children themselves become convinced of their incompetence and irresponsibility, and may act accordingly. The surest way to foster any trait in a person is to treat that person as if he or she already has it.

Peter Gray, from Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

From TED ...

Dr. Peter Gray compellingly brings attention to the reality that over the past 60 years in the United States there has been a gradual but, overall dramatic decline in children's freedom to play with other children, without adult direction. Over this same period, there has been a gradual but overall dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, suicide, and narcissism in children and adolescents. Based on his own and others' research, Dr. Gray documents why free play is essential for children's healthy social and emotional development and outlines steps through which we can bring free play back to children's lives.

Dr. Gray on how the agendas of public education thwart the passions of students -- and how the ability to self-direct learning is the antidote to this silent killer ...

Remember.

Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), 1510

INESSENTIAL THINGS

What do cats remember of days?

They remember the ways in from the cold,

The warmest spot, the place of food.

They remember the places of pain, their enemies,

the irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil,

the usefulness of dust.

They remember the creak of a bed, the sound

of their owner´s footsteps,

the taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.

Cats remember what is essential of days.

Letting all other memories go as of no worth

they sleep sounder than we,

whose hearts break remembering so many

inessential things.

Brian Patten

Testament.

How Evelyn Waugh saved the English country house ...

In Brideshead Waugh set out with a similar task. Whilst today the purpose of the National Trust seems to be as an occasional stand-in for the John Lewis Café, it was set up in 1859, with the noble founding purpose of promoting “the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest”. This project, at its inception, was not focused on the acquisition of English stately homes. It was the work of writers like Waugh who demonstrated that England’s country piles were of “beauty” and “historic interest”. The National Trust Land Fund was created in 1946. It is a testament to the work that Waugh did to re-inspire interest in England’s ancestral seats, reviving a sense of national identity in touch with our history. Each stately home now stands testament to pride at the intergenerational work. 

Jimmy Buffett, "Cowboy in the Jungle"

Open-Air.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

Claude Debussy

Infinitude.

Bogaerts, House with Garden in the Vosges, 1912

All finite things reveal infinitude:

The mountain with its singular bright shade

Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,

The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope,

A scene beloved of bees;

Silence of water above a sunken tree:

The pure serene of memory of one man,–

A ripple widening from a single stone

Winding around the waters of the world.

Theodore Roethke