Here's to theeOld apple tree!Whence thou mayst bud,And whence thou mayst blow,And whence thou mayst bear,Apples enow:Hats full,Caps full,Bushels,bushels, sacks full,And my pockets full, too!Huzza! huzza!
Revellers typically visited local orchards and fruit trees, sang songs, made a hullabaloo (often by banging pots and pans) and were rewarded by the orchard’s grateful owner with some form of warm, spiced alcoholic drink from a communal wassail bowl or cup. Sometimes a topping of apple, known as "lamb's wool," would be added.
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.Oswald Spengler
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In the thousands of years of human history that predated our current moment of instantaneous communication, the very fabric of human understanding was woven to some extent out of delay, belatedness, waiting. All objects were made of slow time in the way that Copley’s painting concretizes its own situation of delay. I think that if we want to teach history responsibly, we need to give students an opportunity to understand the formative values of time and delay. The teaching of history has long been understood as teaching students to imagine other times; now, it also requires that they understand different temporalities. So time is not just a negative space, a passive intermission to be overcome. It is a productive or formative force in itself.
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“What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.”
— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) January 4, 2025
Joseph de Maistre pic.twitter.com/PXL3Mh9KNS
To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still-just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif, or a prig -- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we" -- and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure -something "we always do." And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man's face-that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face-turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.That is my first reason. Of all the passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
Many years ago, it dawned on me that reading was “listening on paper.” (Writing, to take it a bit further, is essentially “teaching on paper.”) Mitch’s invitation to Deep Listening reminded me of the power of rereading. Deep Understanding does not happen on the first read, the first listen, or the first reflection. I can only imagine how many times Peter Koestenbaum read his own source material, reflected, discussed, and wrote about the ideas included in his books before they went to print. All of which reminds me that one of the most effective paths to Deep Understanding might be revisiting writing that already resonated with us, looking for what more we can uncover. Rereading might be a good regimen to consider adopting. New understanding not only comes from new material, but equally often from experiencing familiar work with fresh eyes, months or even years later. What we see on the second read is almost never the same as it was on the first time through.
