Freedom.

Freedom breeds inequality. 

Unless you have freedom to be unequal, ...

... there is no such thing as freedom.

William F. Buckley Jr., from God and Man at Yale

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Happy Birthday, Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on this date in 1859.

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from The Sign of Four

Would.

Happy Birthday, Wagner

Richard Wagner was born on this date in 1813.

Emmanuel Krivine conducts The National Orchestra of France in a performance of the "Siegfried Idyll" ...

Real.

Thin Lizzy, "Don't Believe a Word"

Preservativi.

Pile.

Adams, Southwark Cathedral, London, 1920

There is no telling," said he, "what treasures are hid in that glorious old pile. It is a famous place for antiquarian plunder; there are such rich bits of old time sculpture for the architect, and old time story for the poet. There is as rare picking in it as a Stilton cheese, and in the same taste -- the mouldier the better.”

Washington Irving, from Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Safe.

Hodler, Lilac Tree, 1892

Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest

      He who has found our hid security,

Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,

      And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’

We have found safety with all things undying,

      The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,

The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,

      And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.

We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.

      We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,

      Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;

Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;

And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

Rubert Brooke

Tubes Group, "Turn Me On"

Make a mess and clean it ...

Miracle.

Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief – how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration – near infinite – of natural impulses? Yet, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature’s molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?

William F. Buckley Jr.

Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Outlaw Blood"

Relentlessly.

It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side.

William F. Buckley Jr., from the mission statement of National Review, November 19, 1955

Please note in the image above that Mr. Buckley is not hugging, kissing, or smearing make-up on Old Glory.

Strangeness.

I think that poetry at its greatest–in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake–has one broad and essential difficulty; it is the true mode for expanding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness. Owen Barfield was one of several critics to bring forth strangeness as a poetic criterion. For him, as for Walter Pater before him, the Romantic added strangeness to beauty: Wallace Stevens, a part of this tradition, has a Paterian figure cry out: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.  As Barfield intimates, consciousness is to poetry what marble is to sculpture: the material that is being worked. Words are figurations of consciousness: metaphorical of consciousness, the poet’s words invite us to share in a strangeness.

Harold Bloom, from The Best Poems in the English Language

Endure.

Neil Gaiman explores the way stories, myths and tales survive over great lengths of time and why creating for the future means making works that will endure within the oral tradition ...

Struggling.

Memorizing by rote, of course, is no good for anyone. But memorizing that comes out of deep reading and reading out loud to yourself so that you are really struggling with something that finds you and won't leave you does a great deal for people.  The more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know.

Harold Bloom

Björk, ¨Oceania¨

Happy Birthday, Russell

Betrand Russell was born on this date in 1872.

If you sympathise with everybody it comes to much the same as sympathising with none.

Bertrand Russell

Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1

Isabel Yuri, cello, and Miloš Katanić, accordion (YES!) ...

Connie Constance, "Lose My Mind"

Satie, Gymnopédie No. 2

Olga Scheps performs ...

Satie, Gnossienne No. 1

Sefa Emre İlikli performs ...

Regular.

That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being — to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.

Malcolm Gladwell

Happy Birthday, Satie

Erik Satie was born on this date in 1866.

Alison Balsom performs a version of Gymnopédie No. 3 ...

Paradise.

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

Jorge Luis Borges

Jimmy Buffett, "Take Another Road"

It's sandwich time.

Fugitive.

Vincent Van Gogh was obsessed with the pigments in his paints, and he knew as much or more about their composition and vulnerability as many of his contemporaries. So it is a tragic irony that many of the bright red and yellow pigments van Gogh used on his masterpieces are fading or changing color with time.

Pigment breakdown is, of course, not just a problem with van Gogh’s oeuvre: He was using many of the same pigments as other late-19th-century Northern European artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir or James Ensor. “You can safely say that many works from that period have probably been affected in some way by similar pigment issues,” says Ella Hendriks, senior conservator at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam.

Yet the artwork of van Gogh has become a lens through which scientists study pigment degradation. He was a prolific painter—in the 10 years he was active as an artist, van Gogh produced nearly 1,000 paintings. He was also a prolific writer: In letters to family and friends, he discussed in detail the pigments he purchased and the colors of his newly painted canvases. These written records are a valuable starting point for scientific inquiry.

As a result, van Gogh’s canvases have led to multiple discoveries about the breakdown of fragile—or what conservators call “fugitive”—pigments. What follows is a series of vignettes about how analysis of his paintings has helped illuminate chemical degradation pathways in age-old pigments and how this research informs display and conservation practices for van Gogh’s inimitable masterpieces and other artworks of his time.

CONNECT

Reciting.

He had read everything worth reading, or claimed to have. When he could still walk, he would allow bystanders on Yale quads to quote random lines of Milton to him, and he would pick up the line and keep reciting until he reached the other end of the quad.

CONNECT

Leftover Salmon, "Evermore"

Thyself.

Leonardo, Annunciation (detail), 1472

14

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find;
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
           Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
           Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.

William Shakespeare

Connected.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

James Baldwin

Debussy, Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum

Kim Barbier performs ...

Spell.

HUNGER

I only find within my bones, A taste for eating earth and stones.
When I feed, I feed on air, Rocks and coals and iron ore.
My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed: A field of bran.
Gather as you can the bright, Poison weed.
Eat the rocks a beggar breaks,
The stones of ancient churches' walls,
Pebbles, children of the flood, Loaves left lying in the mud.

Beneath the bush a wolf will howl, Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl: Like him, I devour myself.
Waiting to be gathered, Fruits and grasses spend their hours;
The spider spinning in the hedge, Eats only flowers.
Let me sleep! Let me boil, On the altars of Solomon;
Let me soak the rusty soil, And flow into Kendron.

Finally, O reason, O happiness, I cleared from the sky the blue which is darkness, and I lived as a golden spark of this light, Nature. In my delight, I made my face look as comic and as wild as I could:

It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.
O my eternal soul,
Hold fast to desire
In spite of the night
And the day on fire.
You must set yourself free
From the striving of Man
And the applause of the World!
You must fly as you can...
No hope, forever; No _orietur._
Science and patience,
The torment is sure.
The fire within you,
Soft silken embers,
Is our whole duty--
But no one remembers.
It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

I became a fabulous opera. I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness. Action isn't life; it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain. It seemed to me that everyone should have had several other lives as well. This gentleman doesn't know what he's doing; he's an angel. That family is a litter of puppy dogs. With some men, I often talked out loud with a moment from one of their other lives-- that's how I happened to love a pig. Not a single one of the brilliant arguments of madness-- the madness that gets locked up-- did I forget; I could go through them all again, I've got the system down by heart. It affected my health. Terror loomed ahead. I would fall again and again into a heavy sleep, which lasted several days at a time, and when I woke up, my sorrowful dreams continued. I was ripe for fatal harvest, and my weakness led me down dangerous roads to the edge of the world, to the Cimmerian shore, the haven of whirlwinds and darkness. I had to travel, to dissipate the enchantments that crowded my brain. On the sea, which I loved as if it were to wash away my impurity, I watched the compassionate cross arise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Felicity was my doom, my gnawing remorse, my worm. My life would forever be too large to devote to strength and to beauty. Felicity! The deadly sweetness of its sting would wake me at cockcrow-- ad matutinum, at the Christus venit-- in the soberest of cities.

O seasons, O chateaus! Where is the flawless soul?
I learned the magic of Felicity. It enchants us all.
To Felicity, sing life and praise, Whenever Gaul's cock crows.
Now all desire has gone-- It has made my life its own.
That spell has caught heart and soul, And scattered every trial.

O seasons, O chateaus! And, oh, the day it disappears, Will be the day I die.
O seasons, O chateaus! All that is over. Today, I know how to celebrate beauty.

Arthur Rimbaud

Expanse.

The view of Earth from space is one that few of us will ever get to experience. To see the planet as a single orb in the expanse of space can change the way you feel about your life, our species, and our place in the universe. It’s an experience currently reserved for the fortunate few who carry the torch of humanity into space.

Helen Sharman, Daniel Tani, Michael Barratt and Jean-Francois Clervoy recall that moment when they first set eyes on our blue planet from above.

Prayer.

I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration.  To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! That is what I call prayer.

Claude Debussy

Wild.

You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.

Isadore Duncan

To be painted on the classroom wall.

Secret.

The almost-always-locked “secret library” on the eighth floor of Bingham Hall, otherwise known as the Comparative Literature Library, could be the university’s most reclusive study spot. Only faculty and comp lit graduate students are granted keys. The library, which holds more than 2,500 works of literature in ten languages, offers commanding views of Old Campus and downtown New Haven; it opens up for events throughout the year, such as poetry readings and literature lectures. According to campus legend, a secret society, the Yale Society for Exploration of Campus Secrets, was founded within its gothic walls.

CONNECT

You.

Hellberg, Forget-Me-Nots, 2017

On BEAUTY

And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
     And he answered:
     Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall your find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?
     And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?

     The aggrieved and the injured say, “Beauty is kind and gentle. 
     Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.”
     And the passionate say, “Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
     Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.”

     The tired and the weary say, “Beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
     Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
     But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
     And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”

     At night the watchmen of the city say, “Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.”
     And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, “We have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.”

     In winter say the snow-bound, “She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.”
     And in the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.”
     All these things have you said of beauty,
     Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
     And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy
     It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
     But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
     It is not in the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
     But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
     It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
     But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

     People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
     But you are life and you are the veil.
     Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
     But you are eternity and you are the mirror. 

Kahlil Gibran

Beppe Gambetta, "Dove Tia O Vento / Where The Wind Blows"

Dog.

Leap.

Davis, Stormy Night at Sankaty Light, 2020

The STORM

1

Against the stone breakwater,

Only an ominous lapping,

While the wind whines overhead,

Coming down from the mountain,

Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;

A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,

And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against

the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?

There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,

The waves not yet high, but even,

Coming closer and closer upon each other;

A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,

Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,

The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,

Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!—

And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,

A cat runs from the wind as we do,

Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,

Where the heavy door unlocks,

And our breath comes more easy,—

Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over

The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating

The walls, the slatted windows, driving

The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer

To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.

We wait; we listen.

The storm lulls off, then redoubles,

Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,

Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,

Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,

Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.

The bulb goes on and off, weakly.

Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,

Breathing heavily, hoping—

For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,

The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,

The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,

And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

Theodore Roethke

Sunfish.

Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Bad Trick"

You got to have some scars if you want to be a poet
To get your weeds out of the garden, you got to hoe it

Mukwa.

Mukwa ... bear medicine.

CONNECT

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Champagne.

Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for -- it’s Champagne! 

Winston Churchill

Handel, Atalanta, HWV 35

Alison Balsom performs the Overture with The English Concert, directed by Trevor Pinnock ...

Teaches.

Thanks, Kurt.