Mt. Fuji clouds at dawn; Takashi Nakazawa (I love the multiple lenticular clouds that can often be seen wreathed around and above tall volcanoes like Mt. Shasta or Lassen)*
Where I sit, the world
is quiet, unassuming.
Snow falls and becomes
rain, rain falls
and becomes snow.
I write on a pad of paper
and think of the tea
steeping in the cup near me.
There is no Mayakovski,
no pistol to end the silence.
Not in this room or the next.
~ John Guzlowski
*
Mayakovsky in Germany, 1923The excellence of this poem lies in the contrast between the quiet, mundane first three stanzas and the last one. Just as we are beginning to doze off, a pistol goes off — by not going off. The power of words — the mere mention of what once happened makes it happen again in our mind, though the words state the opposite. The drama of the famous poet’s suicide is enacted through negation — a brilliant gambit. The silence is made to express a deafening gunshot:
There is no Mayakovski,
no pistol to end the silence.
Not in this room or the next.
*
Yes, poetry can sneak up on the reader like that. It can start very quietly, with mundane trivia, and then — the Apocalypse.
RAIN
It rained during the night.
Did the snails sleep or paddle?
The pine tree strained itself and grew for a millimeter
and there, far away, Lebanon was bombed.
~ Tomaž Šalamun
This is the entire poem. It’s not called The Bombing of Lebanon. It’s called Rain. Art achieves its magic by being indirect.
It’s not that the Slovenian poet lacks empathy with the victims of the raids. On the contrary: we can be sure that the horror of those raids is more real to him (he was born in 1941) than to the average reader. And it’s only after first writing about the rain, feebly joking about the snails and the pine tree that grew all of a mere millimeter — it’s only after that that he drops the bomb (pun both intended and unintended): Lebanon. Beirut, that beautiful city once known as the “Paris of the Middle East.”
Beirut after a bombing raid*
Mayakovski's name brings a sweet high school memory to me. Our Russian textbook had a few propaganda-type poems by Mayakovski that seemed like shouting through a bullhorn rather than the kind of intimate whisper that real poetry tends to be. Our Russian teacher expressed her disdain for those, and read to us instead a long love poem of his to muse, Lily Brik. The poem mentioned that Lily's “little eyes” got swollen due to malnutrition. Mayakovski used his writer's more generous food allowance to buy parsley and other greens for Lily — and she recovered. That's all I now remember about that poem — and Mayakovski as a “cloud in trousers.”
It was brave of our Russian teacher to disregard the poems in the textbook and insist on a real poem, a love poem — but the part about malnutrition was an eye opener, mentioning as it did the terrible hardship that ordinary people suffered after the Revolution. Marina Tzvetayeva even put her younger daughter in an orphanage, hoping that the child would receive more food there. Alas, that proved untrue, and the child died.
*
BALZAC AND DE TOCQUEVILLE: ONE OF THEM HAD A NOVELIST’S ADVANTAGE
~ “Balzac’s writing is engrossing, entertaining, revelatory and merciless. He has an artist’s eye for visual detail, and a hard-boiled newsman’s aversion to euphemism. In his age, he frequently came under attack for his unsparing portrayal of human foibles and folly. If you visit his house in Paris, a green-shuttered villa with a tiny garden, hidden on a verdant hillside in Passy, with creaking floors that make you feel you are being tailed by Balzac’s suspicious ghost, you will see plaques on the wall that set forth the scathing rebukes he received from his critics. His reputation survived the fury of his peers; and two hundred years on, reading his novels still produces frisson — and recognition that human vices and vicissitudes have not changed all that much in two centuries, though they do not always feel as Balzackian as they do at the present moment.
Old Goriot tracks the climb up the slippery, clattery Parisian social ladder of a handsome, passionate, earnest young man in his early twenties named Eugène de Rastignac, who arrives in Paris from the south of France (think of it as the French version of the American Midwest — the provenance of down-to-earth, straightforward folk), determined to make his mark.
Everyone in Old Goriot, including the hero, is constantly rising or falling in social status, with abrupt consequences in their treatment by others — like the characters in the Jules Verne fairy tale “The Rat Family,” who change species (up or down on the evolutionary continuum, from man to mollusk and back) as their luck changes. While Eugène studies law (half-heartedly) and falls in love (ardently) in Paris, he lives in a grimy boarding house run by a blowsy penny-pinching widow named Madame Vauquer, who treats her boarders rudely when their fortunes flag, and knows the price of every comestible she serves, down to the half sou. Eugène’s doting provincial family pays his tuition and board, and sends him extra money (which they cannot afford) when he needs to buy fashionable clothes to gain entrée to elite circles. This is not as frivolous as it sounds: the family’s long-term security depends on Eugène’s success at cutting a dash, and his ability to monetize his éclat.
Among Madame Vauquer’s boarders (besides Eugène) are a naïve, pious, penniless maiden named Victorine, whose selfish brother has persuaded their wealthy father to disinherit her; and a Lear-like retired pasta merchant named Goriot, who has bankrupted himself to launch his two daughters into the haut monde, converting his lifesavings into dowries to buy them titled husbands. Eugène falls in love with one of the daughters. But there is yet another notable boarder at the Maison Vauquer: a schemer named Vautrin, who knows all the ins and outs of the enclaves of influence. Vautrin takes a shrewd interest in Eugène, hoping that, if he succeeds in elevating the boy into the Bourbon Elysium, he will be rewarded with a sizable nest egg, which Vautrin intends to use to leave France, and reinvent himself in egalitarian America.
*
I chose Old Goriot as our first book of 2019 for a very particular reason, beyond Balzac-boosting. For two years, since Donald Trump’s accession to the U.S. Presidency, I’ve been teaching a course called “Facts/Alternative Facts: American Media from Tocqueville to Trump,” at the New School in New York City. The class draws on Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial examination of the social and political life of the United States, half a century into our country’s existence. Last December, it occurred to me that Tocqueville and Balzac wrote at the same time and were about the same age (Balzac was five years older); and, furthermore, that Democracy in America and Old Goriot were published in the same year, 1835. If there had been a National Book Awards in France at the time, those two books would have been shoo-ins for Best Work of Non-Fiction and Best Work of Fiction.
During the nine months he spent in America, Tocqueville traveled widely, gained a prodigious amount of information about the customs and convictions of the populace, and schooled himself in the foundational documents of this country, like the U.S. Constitution [246] and the Federalist Papers. Echoing Alexander Hamilton (Federalist 67-77), Tocqueville held that a U.S. President (whom he referred to as the “elective magistrate”) likely would not act as tyrannically as kings often do; and that if he tried to, the Senate would slap him down. Because of Senate supervision, he explained, “in his relations with foreign powers,” the American president “can neither corrupt nor be corrupted.”
Many Americans fiercely opposed the creation of a Chief Executive; the memory of the oppressions of King George III was too near. Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay published the essays that later came to be called The Federalist Papers in 1787 and 1788, months before the Constitution was ratified, to refute the detractors. In Federalist 67, “The Executive Department,” Hamilton poked fun at scaredy-cats who thought an American president might succumb to monarchical excesses, like wanting to be “surrounded with minions and mistresses, giving audience to the envoys of foreign potentates in all the supercilious pomp of majesty.” He derided the notion that a democratically elected U.S. President would ever embrace “images of Asiatic despotism,” or defend “murdering janizaries.”
Hamilton could not have anticipated Presidential tweetstorms and statements cozying up to a North Korean despot, embracing a Russian autocrat, and endorsing a Saudi Arabian potentate, who (the CIA has concluded), ordered the ambush and murder of a Washington Post reporter last October in Istanbul. Tocqueville (by my reading) was less wary of Presidential abuse of power than of the “omnipotence” of public opinion in America, the “tyranny of the majority.” Famously, he wrote: “I know of no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”
Like the contemporary novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard — who warned in 2015 that writers in the current age were censoring themselves, hiding their true thoughts behind an “invisible wall” for fear of being shunned or shamed on social media and beyond, Tocqueville saw the danger of the herd mentality, and recognized the media’s power to influence that herd. Warning that “the word of a strong-minded man which alone reaches to the passions of a mute assembly has “more power than the confused cries of a thousand orators,” he showed more wariness of the mute assembly than of the “elective magistrate” in America. Tocqueville did not anticipate Donald Trump, of course; but arguably, he foresaw Twitter.
And yet, Tocqueville was exhilarated and fascinated by the equality he found in this country, believed it would stick, and believed it augured “the approaching irresistible and universal spread of democracy throughout the world.” He dreamed of a republican France, in which the fortunes of Balzac’s Rastignac and all the other denizens of the Human Comedy, in Paris in 1819 or in any country, in any year, would no longer depend on the fickle whims and tyrannical impulses of rich, corrupt, powerful autocrats and their courtiers.
Balzac died in 1850, while still toiling on his never-ending oeuvre; knowing that, whatever governments — aristocratic or democratic — might rise or fall; whatever good or bad presidents and kings might come along, the frailties and fungibility of the human condition would stay the same, and needed to be recorded. “Mankind lives under changing conditions,” Tocqueville had observed in 1848, “and new destinies are impending.” Under whatever conditions — democratic or autocratic — the shape of those destinies will always be easier for a novelist to capture in hindsight than for a social observer to predict.” ~
https://lithub.com/if-de-tocqueville-predicted-twitter-balzac-knew-trump-would-use-it/?fbclid=IwAR2TILXcWkwiBdRoPjqU0a_WtlpjQYkIN8YBeuhhOY2zmOhPsJ0y5fE0zdc
Rodin’s famous Nude Balzac*
“To my question, as to whether we might fortify our minds for the approach of death, he answered in a passion, ‘No, Sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.’ He added, with an earnest look, ‘A man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine.’” ~ James Boswell, in his account of Samuel Johnson
Oriana:
Still, according to what I’ve read, Johnson was by no means calm when his own death was near. But who can blame him for simply being human? There is still wisdom in his statement: “It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.”
Part of Johnson’s anguish may have been due to his belief in the afterlife — which includes the possibility of hell. Letting go of feast of life is never an easy prospect, but at least an atheist knows that no suffering awaits — it will be just as before he was born, with no consciousness of missing anything. But to be filled with the terror of eternal damnation — I’ve been there. I resolved it by deciding “so be it” — better suffer than worship a sadistic monster who sends people to hell.
Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds, 1772*
LEPRECHAUNS MADE ME DO IT
AN EASTER MUSICAL
*
A DIFFERENT KIND OF THEORY OF EVERYTHING
~ “In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world. The first approach used Newton’s law of gravity, according to which the objects exert a pull on each other. The second imagined a gravitational field extending through space, which the objects distort. The third applied the principle of least action, which holds that each object moves by following the path that takes the least energy in the least time. All three approaches produced the same, correct prediction. They were three equally useful descriptions of how gravity works.
If anything, Feynman’s example understated the mystery of the Rashomon effect, which is actually twofold. It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action.
It happens again and again that, when there are many possible descriptions of a physical situation—all making equivalent predictions, yet all wildly different in premise—one will turn out to be preferable, because it extends to an underlying reality, seeming to account for more of the universe at once. And yet this new description might, in turn, have multiple formulations—and one of those alternatives may apply even more broadly. It’s as though physicists are playing a modified telephone game in which, with each whisper, the message is translated into a different language.
Arkani-Hamed now sees the ultimate goal of physics as figuring out the mathematical question from which all the answers flow. “The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven,” he told me, “would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned_1-visit&fbclid=IwAR21H796nn39j9YbWAItnalzrlyu2WzrayWGp-bl-AI8LVyBvLy_Tfq1U5Y
This reminds me of the alleged last words of Gertrude Stein. She asked, “So, what is the answer?” Silence. None of her friends gathered at her deathbed could think of anything to say. Gertrude responded, “In that case, what is the question?”
When a question is particularly apt, it seems to contain its own answer — or rather, many answers, but one of them will please us most.
As for the nature of reality, the debate continues. And I'm not sure that we’ll ever find THE right question from which the answers (i.e. the universe) will follow.
It seems that what we are learning is, above all, humility.
*
Mary:
Let me do a little riff on the ideas of questions, answers, and the universe. What came before everything? Some kind of homogeneous nothing . . . that seems to be implied by both science and our familiar biblical creation myth. Silence, nothingness, then the Big Bang, or the Word, and from that everything follows in an endless cascade of division and differentiation. The creator busies himself separating things: the waters above from the waters below, light from dark, land from sea, life from inert matter, and so on and on ending up with his chosen and everybody else, the blessed and the damned. In the course of these divisions we get before and after, that is, time, and thus history.
Science gives us a similar narrative..a homogeneous nothing that suddenly becomes many things..all the particles of matter, the forms of energy, the dynamic between them . . . a cascade of proliferation and differentiation occurring so that there is a before and after, thus time, and history. Not to be flippant, but it does look like a case of long division whose answer eventually contains everything that is, including us. And this seems a process with its own necessity, that goes on and on, maybe until every possible factor and permutation is worked out, tried on, brought into the game.
As to how or why that first division, first word, first explosion happened, that question everything is answer to — I doubt we'll ever know. But the Answer — oh the riches to explore!!
Oriana:
Any kind of human-like creator is obviously a human projection. That humans made the biblical god so vengeful and cruel used to puzzle me until I learned more about cultural evolution and realized that all archaic deities were cruel, reflecting the god-eat-god stressful conditions of life, with death always perched on one’s shoulder. Seeing The Bacchae was an eye-opener for me — the repeated assertion that life would be unbearable without wine.
But the article is about the puzzles of the universe, which make the evolution of religion childishly easy. I was struck by the “Rashomon effect”: the same phenomenon, e.g. gravity, can be explained in several ways, and they all work — but one perspective may be deeper, more useful for further exploration:
~ It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action. ~
I remember when high-school physics got mind-boggling: with particle-wave duality. And then the teacher said: “How does light know which is the shortest path? It doesn’t. It tries all the paths.” There was something completely puzzling and yet satisfying about this answer. Physics was approaching poetry (I understood this physics-poetry equation only later, but I remember liking the answer: it made me happy).
What thrilled me was the idea of a quantum leap — not an incremental leap, but the sudden appearance of an electron (or another elementary particle) at a different energy level. Eventually I had an analogy: it’s like having a breakthrough in poetry. Suddenly you’re not clumsily imitating now TS Eliot, now Plath, now ee commings. You start writing in a strangely “natural” way — what others call “finding your voice.” And it just happens: your brain does it at an unconscious level, and you write it down.
So yes, I can see the analogy with religious explanations, but I prefer to go with physics = poetry. I don’t expect others to have this perspective; it’s not a “truth claim.” But it so happens that my father was a professor of theoretical physics, and for him physics, mathematics — it was all about beauty and poetry. Lots of equations, too, but the point was to get them to an elegant simplicity. No truth, only perspectives — but some please more than others.
Niagara Falls, 1830, Thomas Cole“According to quantum monism, the fundamental layer of reality is not made of particles or strings but the universe itself—understood not as the sum of things making it up but rather as a single, entangled quantum state.” ~ Heinrich Päs
Oriana:
I was instantly reminded of a dear friend of mine, no longer with us, who would have responded to this with "Whatever turns you on." Are he and I still quantum-entangled?
**
Daughters of the American Revolution, Grant Wood, 1930*
A NEW LOOK AT THE VANDALS
Never mind the Daughters of the American Revolution. I may be a distant Daughter of the Vandals.
~ “It is possible that the name Al-Andalus (and its derivative Andalusia) is derived from the Arabic adoption of the name of the Vandals.” ~ Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandals
But it gets hotter: “The toponym al-Andalus is first attested by inscriptions on coins minted in 716 by the new Muslim government of Iberia. These coins, called dinars, were inscribed in both Latin and Arabic.[13][14] The etymology of the name "al-Andalus" has traditionally been derived from the name of the Vandals; however, proposals since the 1980s have challenged this tradition. In 1986, Joaquín Vallvé proposed that "al-Andalus" was a corruption of the name Atlantis” (also from Wiki)
And I have a personal connection: my mother went by Wanda, which in Polish is pronounced Vanda (she rejected Cecylia, her legal first name, chosen by her mother to honor the patron saint of music). I don’t think it ever occurred to my mother that Vanda might mean a “Vandal woman,” just as Judith means a “Jewish woman.” Yet she loved to mention the legend of Vanda, a Krakow princess who chose to throw herself into the Vistula rather than marry a German prince against her will. Vanda’s independent spirit appealed to my mother, who loved the legend.
And it turns out — I found it out just now (talk about very incomplete history lessons) — that the Vandals, an Eastern Germanic tribe, migrated from Scandinavia and at first settled in southern Poland (before Poland existed as a unified country), meaning the region including Krakow.
Vandal gold and glass necklace, around 300 CE*
NERVOUS STATES: DEMOCRACY AND THE DECLINE OF REASON
~ “William Davies suggests that our political situation feels so fraught and divisive because people don’t even agree on a common reality anymore. He offers up the telling example of President Trump’s skirmish with the press over the size of his inauguration crowd. While the media kept pointing to standard pieces of evidence like photographs and numbers, Trump dismissed those items as persecutory insults. “They demean me unfairly,” he complained to a reporter, and then pointed to a photograph from what he insisted was a better angle. “I call it a sea of love.”
“For Trump this was no mere disagreement over ‘facts,’” Davies writes. “It was an opposition between two emotions: the arrogant sneer of his critics and the love of his supporters.”
To an educated class accustomed to letting the facts speak for themselves, the president’s bid to cast a numerical dispute in emotional terms seemed baffling and bizarre. But Trump’s challenge to a complacent reliance on facts has been a long time coming. Davies, a political economist at the University of London, traces how we got here, and offers suggestions about what to do.
He shows how the old Enlightenment faith in reason and expertise developed in the 17th century, as a hopeful and desperate response to the bloody convulsions of the Thirty Years’ War. European philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, seeking to build a foundation of truth that was separable from the vicissitudes of emotion, articulated sharp divisions between war and peace, mind and body.
Such distinctions, Davies argues, are breaking down. A proliferation of new technologies and forms of conflict, including terrorism and cyberwarfare, have pushed us into a state of profound uncertainty and heightened alertness. Hence the “nervous states” of the book’s title — referring not only to the anxiety that attends so much political life these days, but to the actual nervous system that mediates between body and mind, producing sensations like pain, arousal and excitement.
“As we become more attuned to ‘real time’ events and media, we inevitably end up placing more trust in sensation and emotion than in evidence,” Davies writes. “Knowledge becomes more valued for its speed and impact than for its cold objectivity, and emotive falsehood often travels faster than fact.”
It’s become a bit of a sport to lay into the technocratic elite, to berate them for an overweening arrogance and a hapless centrism; Davies himself writes critically of how technical expertise has historically been deployed not just in the service of greater understanding but also for the purposes of colonialism and slavery. Today, extreme inequality makes charts about aggregate growth look cold and unfeeling; when a grand total of 42 individuals control as much wealth as 3.7 billion of the world’s poorest people, calculations of G.D.P. can come across as not only irrelevant but mocking.
But Davies also wants to remind us what expertise was supposed to offer in the first place. “Much of the value of objectivity in public life, as manifest in statistics or economics, is that it provides a basis for consensus among people who otherwise have little in common,” Davies writes. It may be hard to fathom now, but facts — and the consensus they allowed, no matter how temporary or tenuous — were a “basis for progress.”
One response to the crisis of expertise has come from the likes of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, who assert that the only path forward is a doubling down on the wonders of scientific fact. But this “bravado rationalism,” with its aloof dismissiveness and bullying imperiousness, only serves to inflame the problem it purports to solve.
Rather than issue high-handed proclamations, what we need now, Davies says, is something more humble, and admittedly more scary. “The political task is to feel our way toward less paranoid means of connecting with one another,” he writes, aware that this sounds like an impossible project at a time when everybody feels aggrieved and nobody feels safe. Suffering is real; but in this increasingly unequal and ecologically besieged world, vulnerability is also something that more and more people share.
After all, as Davies puts it, “If those committed to peace are not prepared to do this work of excavation, then those committed to conflict will happily do so instead.” ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/books/review-nervous-states-democracy-decline-of-reason-william-davies.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Books
*
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.” ~ Thomas Sowell
*
Valley of Dry Bones [Ezekiel’s Vision, "Shall these bones live?"] by Quentin Metsys the Younger, c. 1589. Who can resist the skeleton “censoring” a nude man’s genitals? *
THE WISDOM OF AGE? WHY OLDER PEOPLE MAKE FEWER DUMB MISTAKES
~ “There’s a longstanding vein of research in psychology that studies two contrasting strategies for decision-making: plans and habits. Navigation provides a classic example of how these strategies differ. If you’re driving somewhere for the first time—to a new restaurant, say—then you’ll need a plan to get there. You will need to know whether to turn left or right at a given intersection, because you don’t already have that information stored away in your head. You just haven’t encountered it. On the other hand, you don’t need a plan when you’re going somewhere familiar—for instance, the supermarket—because the sequence of steps that will take you there are stored as a habit. You don’t have to think about them.
Neuroscientists Hillary Raab and Catherine Hartley recently surveyed how our use of plans and habits changes over the course of our lives. What the research suggests is that we tend to rely more on plans when we’re younger, and habits when we’re older. This makes sense. An infant can’t use habits to make decisions, because any situation she’s in will be a new one. As we build up a store of familiar situations, the more we can rely on habits. The older you are, the more likely your behavior is based on tried-and-true habits than fresh planning.
But what does this tell us about wisdom? Well, for one thing, it suggests that wisdom is interactive, not static: it is a relationship between a person and their surroundings. The reason that wisdom seems to flow so effortlessly from well-seasoned minds is that they have a store of habitual information about how to act in a given situation. And the thing about habits is that you don’t know why they work, just that they do. This is, in part, what separates wisdom from knowledge. Wisdom seems mysterious because it’s inexplicable, predicated upon life experience instead of logical premises. This gives us something of an explanation for why seemingly wiser people can intuit the best course of action.
Mature people make fewer dumb mistakes because they’ve grown adept at not making silly decisions in the situations they frequently encounter. But put them in a new situation and they’re just as likely to screw up as anyone else. The problem here is that there’s a confound with our notion wisdom: a person’s likelihood of encountering a new situation. Twenty-year-olds encounter way more new situations than do seventy-year-olds. If you controlled for the familiarity of the situation—giving the different age groups the same number of unfamiliar encounters—then they’d probably make the same number of mistakes.
I think this should give us a bit of pause about our conventional notion of wisdom. It is more much situation-dependent we might otherwise think. While this doesn’t nullify the validity of insights from wise elders, it does imply some constraints on how we should expect such knowledge will apply. While wisdom gives you expertise within a particular environment, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to generalize that to new experiences. It's not that we necessarily get wiser as we get older, but we put ourselves in fewer situations where we are likely to make mistakes.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friendly-interest/201902/why-wisdom-doesnt-work-well-we-think-it-does?collection=1125370
Oriana:
While wisdom may indeed be more situation-dependent than we habitually assume, there is also the so-called “school of hard knocks.” Anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can’t fail to learn a great deal from experience — and from good books, and from observing others.
One thing we can’t fail to learn is that actions have consequences. Thus, “expressing yourself” is hardly the supreme value it was assumed to be in the sixties. Self-control, more listening, and thinking before you speak are all highly adaptive — and usually result in more kindness toward others.
And kindness is perhaps the essence of wisdom. The Ancient Greeks believed that a wise person is also the good person.
Another thing we learn the hard way is that everything is more complex than we thought in our early years. An eighteen-year-old knows everything. Someone closer to eighty than eighteen knows how little she knows. But she does know that, barring extremes, nothing is all good or all bad. A curse often contains a blessing, and a blessing a curse — and that Teresa of Avila was right: more tears are shed over answered prayers than over the unanswered ones.
And that everything passes. And that you are not “separate, different, and superior.” That everything is interconnected.The list could go on, but I’d be accused of spouting clichés. But a lot of clichés are true. It’s part of the wisdom of age to humbly acknowledge this.
*
“A man of piety complained to the Besht [better known as the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism], saying: ‘I have labored hard and long in the service of the Lord, and yet I have received no improvement. I am still an ordinary and ignorant person.’
“The Besht answered: ‘You have gained the realization that you are ordinary and ignorant, and this in itself is a worthy accomplishment.’” ~ from "The Hasidic Anthology, Tales and Teachings of the Hasidim
Sakai Hōitsu: Crows in the Moonlight, early 19th century*
COULD COCKROACHES SURVIVE A NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE?
~ “The U.S. TV series Mythbusters tested the cockroach survival theory in 2012 when they exposed cockroaches to radioactive material. The roaches survived longer than humans would have, but they all died at extreme levels of radiation.
University of Melbourne evolutionary biologist Mark Elgar says the results of the Mythbusters test are incomplete because they only looked at how many days the cockroaches lived after exposure. They didn’t look at the cockroaches’ ability to produce viable eggs, thus ensuring the continued survival of the species. Elgar said:
There is some evidence that they seem quite resilient to gamma rays, although they are not necessarily the most resistant across insects.
You could argue that some ants, particularly those that dig nests deep into the ground, would be more likely to survive an apocalypse than cockroaches.
Previous tests of insects subjected to radiation found that cockroaches, though six to 15 times more resistant than humans, would still fare worse than the humble fruit fly.
Cockroaches breed quickly, lay large numbers of eggs and are harder to kill with chemicals than other household insects – all traits that could contribute to the popular belief that they could withstand anything, even a nuclear bomb. Elgar said:
They are quite well defended. If you try and squish a cockroach it usually gives off an unpleasant smell that acts as a pretty effective deterrent for anything attempting to capture them. They’re flat, so they can escape into places you can’t easily access.
Cockroaches feed off the detritus of other living organisms, however; so Professor Elgar questions whether they would be able to thrive without humans and other animals.
For a while they’ll be able to eat dead bodies and other decaying material but, if everything else has died, eventually there won’t be any food. And they’re not going to make much of a living.
The reality is that very little, if anything, will survive a major nuclear catastrophe, so in the longer term, it doesn’t matter really whether you’re a cockroach or not.” ~
https://earthsky.org/earth/would-cockroaches-survive-nuclear-apocalypse?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=900503c7bd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-900503c7bd-394935141
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ALIENS SERVING ISRAEL: THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF PROPHECY
Aliens shall stand and feed your flocks,
foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers;
but you shall be called the priests of the Lord,
men shall speak of you as the ministers of our God,
you shall eat the wealth of the nations,
and in their riches you shall glory (Isa. 61:5-6)
Of courses Isaiah means the future glory of Israel, but anyone who lives in California will immediately think of Hispanic farm workers. And it could certainly be argued that America has been eating the wealth of nations.
Ah, that’s because America is the real Promised Land, some believers may say. But the part about being “priests of the Lord” applies neither to Americans nor to the citizens of modern Israel. Jews are the most secular ethnic group in the US. Israel is a secular state, and no one perceives its citizens as a priestly class, with foreigners doing non-priestly work, especially in agriculture — in Isaiah’s time, nothing was as important as agriculture, which was also brutal hard labor.
Isaiah softens his visions of the servitude of foreigners by saying that if they accept the Jewish law and don’t profane the Sabbath, they too will be allowed to make “burnt offerings and sacrifices” on Yahweh’s altar.
A really big offering was not a lamb but a bullock. An adult bull would presumably be even more impressive, but is not quite as easy to slaughter, and the huge carcass would be a mess. Still, one way or another, the altars were supposed to flow with blood. And this was a major prophet’s vision of the ideal world.
Some earlier verses specify which nations in particular will offer their wealth, including slaves, to the future Israel:
Thus says the Lord:
“The wealth of Egypt and the merchandise of Ethiopia,
and the Sabeans, men of stature,
shall come over to you and be yours,
they shall follow you;
they shall come over in chains and bow down to you.” (Isa. 45:14)
This was par for the times, and I don’t hold it against the prophet that he conceived of glory according to what glory meant in his times. Still, to come face to face with how different the world was then can be unnerving.
Isaiah probably never traveled very far; his world was tiny by our modern standards. For him there was no question as to which nation “shall eat the wealth of [other] nations.”
I read the bible only in adulthood, and was completely startled by the archaic character of it. My religion classes were very selective and the nuns and priests tried hard to present the stories in a way that would make some sense in the modern world. The actual text was a shock.
Raphael: Isaiah, 1512*
ending on beauty:
Does God still speak Yiddish?
Is God too an immigrant?
Has he moved to New York?
Is that his limo’s long gleam
down the Avenue of the Americas?
Or is he that homeless man?
~ Oriana, Letters to Lucrezia
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