Picasso: Weeping Woman. "I always saw Dora Maar as a weeping woman, and one day she became that." To me, it’s one of his greatest masterpieces. *
WEEPING WOMAN
in La Jolla, on Fay Avenue,
a non-virgin on the verge,
fighting tears, struggling to sustain
a quivery lipgloss smile.
Smile though your heart is breaking —
the first song I heard in America.
I shocked people, not knowing
what it meant, the American dream.
Now the tearful, middle-aged, no longer
beautiful woman in La Jolla,
California’s richest town,
reminded me of those first weeks —
how shocking I was in general.
A professor explained:
being small, and from Eastern
Europe, I wasn’t supposed to quote
Nietzsche and sound intelligent:
“People are uncomfortable
because they can’t put you
in a convenient slot.”
Slot and slut — I was learning
to be careful about vowels,
not to mention the crisp terminal
consonants as in ship.
In Milwaukee I was always asked,
“Did you come by plane or by boat?”
Boat, I used to think, was too small
to cross the Atlantic, as in row, row,
row your boat. Useless, the English
they teach you in school. Still,
I felt a quickening when I saw
the sticker Rocinante on someone's
non-luxury car — Don Quixote's
immortal nag. And again
yesterday: after smiling at the tearful
woman in La Jolla, in the thick of
the American Dream, I drove behind
a car with NIHILIST on its license.
For five ecstatic minutes,
I blew telepathic kisses
to the driver, even though
I am against nihilism,
and besides, every woman
is a weeping woman.
~ Oriana
Amazing, these momentary encounters that stay in memory. But would it have stayed in my memory if I didn’t write this poem? No way of telling. But because the poem exist, I see that particular weeping woman now and then, and understand her pain (probably left by her spouse or partner — love causes so much grief when we are young).
*
“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.” ~ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce at 20HOW TO SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE
~ “Your odds of success improve when you are forced to direct all of your energy and attention to fewer tasks.
If you want to master a skill—truly master it—you have to be selective with your time. You have to ruthlessly trim away good ideas to make room for great ones. You have to focus on a few essential tasks and ignore the distractions. You have to commit to working through 10 years of silence.
Simplify and Go All In
If you take a look around, you'll notice very few people actually go “all in” on a single skill or goal for an extended period of time.
Rather than researching carefully and pouring themselves into a goal for a year or two, most people “dip their toes in the water” and chase a new diet, a new college major, a new exercise routine, a new side business idea, or a new career path for a few weeks or months before jumping onto the next new thing.
In my experience, so few people display the persistence to practice one thing for an extended period of time that you can actually become very good in many areas—maybe even world-class—with just one year of focused work. If you view your life as a 20-slot punchcard and each slot is a period of focused work for a year or two, then you can see how you can enjoy significant returns on your invested time simply by going all in on a few things.
My point here is that everyone is holding a “life punchcard” and, if we are considering how many things we can master in a lifetime, there aren't many slots on that card. You only get so many punches during your time on this little planet. Unlike financial investments, your 20 “life slots” are going to get punched whether you like it or not. The time will pass either way.
Don't waste your next slot. Think carefully, make a decision, and go all in. Don't just kind of go for it. Go all in. Your final results are merely a reflection of your prior commitment.
Warren Buffet's house in Omaha, Nebraska; one of several houses he owns. At least he's interested in the common good, and wants to contribute to greater well-being of others.A reader’s comment:
“When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.
He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/warren-buffett-s-20-slot-rule-how-to-simplify-your-life-and-maximize-your-results?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I would add: Think carefully before you get into a complicated hobby. Turning your pool into a koi pond, for instance, means endless chores.
“First you get the koi, and then you get obsessed about them,” a koi enthusiast told me. You start going to koi conventions, pestering others with photos of your aloof, shimmering pets. Still, who are we to judge someone else’s obsessions? One of the things I learned thanks to undergoing my recent medical apocalypse is that you don’t judge — just gape with amazement at how people cope and go on, in spite of the various hardships that no one escapes, not even the rich (a spouse may turn out to be an alcoholic or a non-stop womanizer; a child may turn out to be a drug addict or be mentally ill).
I don’t think there is a contract with the universe that guarantees your life will be just peachy — never mind that you are a good person. Many bad things happen to good people. We preserve the inaccurate memories of beautiful moments and feel grateful to have had them — recently or in the remote past, it doesn’t matter. They seem like miracles.
*
*
ATLANTIS AND OTHER LOST CONTINENTS
~ “More than 2,000 years ago, Plato wrote about a land called Atlantis, where a mighty empire vanished beneath the waves after a series of “excessively violent earthquakes and floods.” His tale has inspired plenty of nonsense in the centuries since, but now it seems that Plato was on to something. New research shows that lost continents are a real thing, and they have had a big impact on human life — though not in the way Plato imagined.
Douwe van Hinsbergen, a geologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has been exploring one of the most dramatic of these lost continents — known as Greater Adria. In a paper published in early September in the journal Gondwana Research, he and his colleagues studied rocks around and beneath the Mediterranean Sea to reveal the full extent of Greater Adria for the first time. “It’s enormous! About the size and rough shape as Greenland,” he says.
If you don’t recall seeing Greater Adria on a map, there’s a reason for that. It is completely buried — not under the ocean, but beneath southern Europe. About 140 million years ago, the two continents began to collide. Greater Adria got bulldozed and buried in the process and mostly sank beneath what is now Italy, Greece and the Baltics.
And Greater Adria is not unique. Emerging studies of Earth’s mantle show likely traces of past lost continents. Analysis of ancient rocks suggest that almost all of Earth’s earliest continents might have disappeared, taking with them much of the history of life on this planet. The evidence of how life first appeared may be lost somewhere down there in the depths.
But lost continents are not entirely lost. Like lost civilizations, they leave traces behind, if you know how to look for them. Van Hinsbergen notes that rocks from Greater Adria got scraped off and incorporated onto the Alps, while whole chunks got embedded in southern Italy and Croatia. Even the parts of Greater Adria that got shoved dozens of miles down into the mantle, the layer below the crust, continue to influence modern Europe.
Under tremendous heat and pressure and over tens of millions of years, limestone rocks from Greater Adria turned into marble. Friction between Greater Adria and Europe then pulled the sunken rocks back to the surface, where people found them and mined them. “That’s where the marble came from that the Romans and the Greeks used for their temples,” van Hinsbergen says.
Plato was literally standing on the remains of a real Atlantis. He just had no idea.” ~
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/real-life-atlantis-lost-continent-found-under-europe-revealing-earth-ncna1055856?fbclid=IwAR3BLH4K4p6UdeDumMLSkHXqBaL3exhFK5ffqsvE04EuAe8uR-sACMMnyFU
THE GHOSTS BEHIND US
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the number by which the dead outnumber the living,” Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968.
That number no longer is accurate: The Population Bureau estimates that around 107 billion people have lived on earth to date, and there are close to 7 billion human beings currently alive -- which means that behind each of us alive today stand fifteen ghosts.
A ghost is a soul (no? well, then, what is it?), and a soul weighs 21 grams, according to (eminently Google-able) Doctor Duncan "Om" McDougall. Thus, the total weight of all the ghosts standing behind our backs is 224.7 million kilos, which would seem like a fairly heave load, but when distributed equanimously between us, amounts to the mere 315 grams of ghost weight per single living person, or a little over 10 oz, or 63 nickels.
63 nickels: not a bad title for a short-story about something perhaps mundanely realistic, like divorce or competitive eating.
63 nickels weighs our individual allotment of ghost matter — the extra load we all carry through our lives.” ~ M. Iossel
Oriana:
It’s interesting to ponder the lives of our ancestors. All those rich experiences, the drama. Each person’s life could make a riveting novel or movie — even if, on the daily basis, it seems like a lot of mundane activities at best, and dubious kinds of employment, e.g. grading Freshman Comp essays. In spite of that, everyone has done something interesting, if only we have the energy to listen, to imagine.
The problem is excess of fascinating tales, not their scarcity. Each life is fascinating, if we see deeply enough.
*
GOVERNMENTS LED BY NARCISSISTS AND PSYCHOPATHS
~ “After spending his early life suffering under the Nazis and then Stalin, the Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski devoted his career to studying the relationship between psychological disorders and politics. He wanted to understand why psychopaths and narcissists are so strongly attracted to power as well as the processes by which they take over governments and countries.
He eventually came up with the term “pathocracy” to describe governments made up of people with these disorders — and the concept is by no means confined to regimes of the past.
It’s not really surprising that people with personality disorders are drawn to political power — narcissists crave attention and affirmation, and feel that they are superior to others and have the right to dominate them. They also lack empathy, which means that they are able to ruthlessly exploit and abuse people for the sake of power. Psychopaths feel a similar sense of superiority and lack of empathy, but without the same impulse for attention and adoration.
But pathocracy isn’t just about individuals. As Lobaczewski pointed out, pathological leaders tend to attract other people with psychological disorders. At the same time, empathetic and fair-minded people gradually fall away. They are either ostracised or step aside voluntarily, appalled by the growing pathology around them.
As a result, over time pathocracies become more entrenched and extreme. You can see this process in the Nazi takeover of the German government in the 1930s, when Germany moved from democracy to pathocracy in less than two years.
Democracy is an essential way of protecting people from pathological politicians, with principles and institutions that limit their power (the Bill of Rights in the US, which guarantees certain rights to citizens is a good example).
This is why pathocrats hate democracy. Once they attain power they do their best to dismantle and discredit democratic institutions, including the freedom and legitimacy of the press. This is the first thing that Hitler did when he became German chancellor, and it is what autocrats such as Trump, Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán have been attempting to do.
In the US, there has clearly been a movement towards pathocracy under Trump. As Lobaczewski’s theory predicts, the old guard of more moderate White House officials – the “adults in the room”– has fallen away. The president is now surrounded by individuals who share his authoritarian tendencies and lack of empathy and morality. Fortunately, to some extent, the democratic institutions of the US have managed to provide some push back.
Britain too has been fairly fortunate, compared to other countries. Certainly there have been some pathocratic tendencies in some of our recent prime ministers (and other prominent ministers), including a lack of empathy and a narcissistic sense of self importance. But the UK’s parliamentary and electoral systems – and perhaps a cultural disposition towards fairness and social responsibility – have protected the UK from some of the worst excesses of pathocracy.
Pathocratic politics today
This is why recent political events seem so alarming. It seems as if the UK is closer to pathocracy than ever before. The recent exodus of moderate Conservatives is characteristic of the purges which occur as a democracy transitions into pathocracy.
The distrust and disregard for democratic processes shown by the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his ministers and advisers — the prorogation of parliament, the insinuation that they may not follow laws they disagree with — is also characteristic of pathocracy.
As a psychologist, I would certainly not attempt to assess Johnson, having never met him. But in my view he is certainly surrounding himself with the most ruthless and unprincipled – and so most pathocratic — elements of his party. The former prime minister David Cameron even referred to Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings as a “career psychopath”.
At the same time, it is important to point out that not everyone who becomes part of a pathocratic government has a psychological disorder. Some people may simply be callous and non-empathic without a fully fledged psychological disorder.
Others may simply possess the kind of narcissism (based on a sense of superiority and entitlement) which arises from a certain style of upbringing. Some politicians may simply follow the party line through loyalty or in the belief that they will be able to rein in the pathocratic impulses of the people around them.
So far, thanks to the actions of parliament and the bravery of a small number of principled Conservative MPs, the potential pathocracy of Johnson’s government has been kept at bay.
But the danger of democracy transitioning into pathocracy is always real. It is always closer to us than we think, and once it has a foothold, will crush every obstacle in its way.” ~
http://theconversation.com/pathological-power-the-danger-of-governments-led-by-narcissists-and-psychopaths-123118?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0V5GkONlfhWMJjmZrT-e5YXi_yGt0MrsjOWQFKm-XqSMV2GWlk8HqU5j0#Echobox=1568897070
Oxford, Balliol College. Johnson "read the classics" there -- one wonders with what effect. *
US BIRTHRATES LOWEST IN THIRTY YEARS
~ “Births in the US have dropped to their lowest rate in 30 years, marking a cultural shift as women delay motherhood, experts say.
The fertility rate has dropped to 1.76 births per woman - the lowest since 1978, the National Centre for Health Statistics said in a report.
Some 3.85 million babies were born in the US in 2017, the fewest since 1987, as births among women in their teens and 20s decreased.
Both the birth rate - the number of births per thousand — and fertility — a lifetime average forecast — fell.
Declining birth rates are common as countries become more developed.
The US fertility rate is lower than the UK's but the US still has a higher fertility rate than many other countries.
While births decreased among younger women in the US last year, it rose in women aged between 40 and 44.
Donna Strobino of Johns Hopkins University put the change down to women choosing to delay motherhood in favor of work.
She told AFP news agency: "Women are becoming more educated, they are in the workforce, they are pursuing their careers.
And in the absence of policies that really help women who are working to really take some time off post-partum you are probably going to see a continuation of this delay."
It does not mean the population will shrink. It may grow at a slower rate, but there will continue to be more and more people in the US.
William Frey of the Brookings Institute called for some perspective on the figures.
"The country isn't going to run out of people," he said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44151642
Oriana:
Again, no reason to panic. The American population is still going to grow, not shrink. So much for the dream of uncrowded freeways.
*
OUR SHRINKING SKULLS AND SLEEP DEPRIVATION
~ “Skeletal records show that for hundreds of thousands of years, people had beautiful skulls: straight teeth, wide jaws, forward faces, large airways. Robert Corruccini, an emeritus anthropology professor at Southern Illinois University, found perfectly straight teeth and wide jaws in children’s skulls from pre-Roman times among Etruscan remains in southern Italy.
Then, about 250 years ago, our faces began to change. Boyd argues that industrialization interrupted the ancestral patterns of weaning and feeding, with babies nursing on demand for years while also trying solid foods under adults’ watchful eyes. Boyd says that the widespread adoption of bottle feeding, pacifiers and soft processed food deprived toddlers of practice chewing and distorted the shapes of their mouths. (“In modern society you have Gerber’s baby food,” Corruccini told me. “Etruscan kids had to chew once they were getting off breast milk. Babies have remarkably powerful chewing capabilities.”) Just like diabetes and heart disease, malocclusion — the misalignment of jaws and teeth — followed industrialization around the globe. Meanwhile, people in societies that never industrialized enjoyed well-aligned teeth and jaws.
Other factors may have played a part too. Environmental pollutants and recirculated indoor air increased the strain on our bodies and worsened pregnant women’s health in regions that industrialized first. That can impact skull shape of babies in utero by affecting birth weight, jaw length, and size of sucking pads in the cheeks. Skeletal records of animals show similar differences in skull shape between animals raised in the wild and those raised in captivity — suggesting that humans’ modern diet and environment play an outsized role in our evolving faces.
One of the first to recognize the shrinking skull was Charles Darwin, who described “civilized” humans as having shorter jaws than the “savages” who lived in non-industrialized societies, in The Descent of Man. “This shortening may, I presume, be attributed to civilized men habitually feeding on soft, cooked food, and thus using their jaws less,” he wrote. “I am informzd by Mr. Brace (the U.S. philanthropist Charles Loring Brace) that it is becoming quite a common practice in the United States to remove some of the molar teeth of children, as the jaw does not grow large enough for the perfect development of the normal number.”
In the 1920s and ’30s, a dentist named Weston Price traveled around the world, taking photographs of the teeth of indigenous people in Africa, Europe, North and South America, and Australia. His photos confirmed Darwin’s suspicions — he documented well-aligned teeth, high palates and forward jaws of non-industrialized populations. Price and Darwin may have been motivated by abhorrent beliefs — eugenics-informed ideas about “civilized” (Caucasian) races being an improvement on “savage” races (African and indigenous peoples) — but their research can still prove useful to modern researchers tracing the evolution of human skeletons.
“I have a CBCT of a five-year-old caucasian who died 250 years ago, and a five year old who’s in my office referred from a pulmonary physician because the kid has sleep apnea. And I can show how that jaw compares to one who died 300 years ago, and how much smaller it is,” Boyd explained to me.
The implications of shrinking modern skulls are more than aesthetic. Our smaller faces do the most harm in one area crucial to physical and mental health: our ability to get a good night’s sleep.
In proper development, the tongue moves along the roof of the mouth to push nutrients toward the esophagus, gently expanding the palate and exercising the lower jaw, lengthening and widening it over time. When a child’s jaw is too short and palate too narrow, their tongue cannot rest against the roof of the mouth and instead rests against the lower teeth. This causes them to routinely breathe through the mouth, an unhealthy habit. Then, as they lie flat to sleep, the tongue may fall back to block the throat, causing apnea. This can worsen into a vicious cycle through overuse of bottles, pacifiers or sippy cups, misshaping the teeth and mouth. Malocclusion and its resultant sleep problems form part of the cluster known as diseases of civilization, including obesity, stress, and depression. These are all conditions largely caused by our modern lifestyle and environment.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine professor Karen Bonuck has documented the damage that sleep problems can cause without early intervention. Her 2012 paper for Pediatrics found that babies and toddlers who mouth-breathed, snored, and experienced apnea were more likely to demonstrate behavior problems at ages four and seven, including hyperactivity, poor conduct, peer problems, and emotional difficulties, based on analysis of more than 11,000 children in a longitudinal study in Avon, a U.K. county. Boyd and his colleagues seized on that paper, and continue to cite it as evidence of the urgent need to identify and solve breathing problems in young children.
Bonuck rattles off a series of research findings on the far-reaching impact of inadequate sleep, zipping from topic to topic like a pinball. This study found that restricting children’s sleep by 30 minutes a night for less than a week lowered their neuropsychological functioning by the equivalent of two years. One meta-analysis, summing up findings from 21 studies, discovered that young children with sleep disordered breathing on average earned grades 12% lower than their peers. Combined with a paper that found kids, on average, have been losing a minute of sleep per year for the last century, this doesn’t bode well for the human race.
“When children don’t sleep, they’re cranky, moody, their expressive language is all impaired. Not only their verbal word-learning. The communication skills are at risk,” Bonuck said. Roughly half of children two to five years old experience sleep problems, defined as difficulty falling or staying asleep; inadequate sleep duration; trouble breathing or interrupted sleep. Yet almost no early intervention screenings address sleep or nighttime breathing. To be sure, sleep comes under pressure from many other factors, including the growth of social media, smartphones, and intense academics earlier in childhood.
When parents bring their children for screening, a simple questionnaire can identify a risk factor for sleep problems, such as mouth-breathing. Solutions range from nasal steroids, speech or myofunctional therapy, and allergy treatment, all the way to adenotonsillectomy, and the early orthodontia that Boyd practices.
“They focus better, less hyper, fewer tantrums, get along with others… Kids do literally grow when they’re sleeping. They’ll be healthier. By the way, this ties into obesity,” Bonuck said, citing a 2011 Institute of Medicine report on preventing childhood obesity and her own 2015 paper that found children’s sleep-disordered breathing and behavioral sleep problems before age seven are both risk factors for obesity at 15.
When children mouth-breathe or snore, the air passing through their throat dries out tissues and raises the risk for infection and inflammation, which would further compress the airway. They miss the many benefits of nasal breathing and disuse causes the nasal airway to shrink, exacerbating the problem.
“They have a chronic sinus infection and congestion. They can’t smell,” explained Joy Moeller, a myofunctional therapist in Los Angeles. “They lose their appetite or become picky eaters, preferring pasta because it’s easier to chew. It may lead to obesity, sleep disorders, or crooked teeth.”
There is no easy way to turn back the evolution of our skulls. It’s unrealistic to advise parents to eschew processed food, breastfeed longer, move to open-air cabins in the country, or perhaps put children on the Paleo diet to prevent these changes taking hold in the skulls of the next generation. We are stuck with our smaller modern faces, but there are steps we can take to address the conditions that come with them.
Across the state from Hanes at Northwestern University’s medical school, sleep medicine doctor Stephen Sheldon explained new techniques — or recovered techniques — that encourage the jaw to grow wider and more forward in order to align the teeth and enlarge the airway, and often enlist myofunctional therapy to create healthy tongue and mouth habits. Traditionally, orthodontists are most concerned with straightening teeth, rather than moving the mandible forward as a primary goal.
“We really don’t know yet which is better and we really need to pursue that question and answer it in a scientific method,” Sheldon said. “We have lots of anecdotes, but depending upon anecdotes is not science.”
Some orthodontists wait for braces. To Boyd, any time you see crowding or potential problems on the horizon, it’s a signal to expand the mouth now. Why delay? The sooner you intervene, the sooner the airway expands and kids start to develop good habits for nasal breathing and tongue position. He’s worked with children as young as two years old, and special needs kids whom some dentists find difficult to treat. Some of his colleagues use removable devices similar to those described in Boyd’s stack of early 20th century research papers.
The problem is getting worse, not better. “More babies are born with anatomy that makes nursing and breastfeeding difficult, raising the risk of developing dysfunctional feeding habits,” said feeding specialist Bahr. “More time on their backs than their tummies, processed foods, bottle feeding, and pacifiers contribute to the misshapen jaw, impairing breathing and sleep. Once their sleep suffers, a range of other problems begin to develop.”
“Often parents don’t even realize their child is having a sleep problem, because they don’t think snoring is a big deal,” he said. “They don’t realize how significant snoring can be to affect the child’s life. They’re waking frequently at night, can’t fall asleep.”
At my own children’s dental office, I found a 20-page parent education pamphlet from the American Dental Association that stresses the importance of teeth cleaning, a healthy diet, regular checkups, preventing injuries, and limits on sucking. Only one page addresses bite problems or teeth alignment, saying that orthodontic treatment usually begins between eight and 14 years of age. There’s no mention of sleep problems that could connect to a mouth and jaw issue, such as snoring, mouth-breathing, restless sleep, frequent nighttime wakings, effortful breathing, or difficulty waking children in the morning.
Humans draw 28,000 breaths each day. We sleep for about one-third of our life. Changing our sleeping and breathing habits can transform our physical and mental health. It all begins in our jaw, mouth, and throat anatomy, which shape the path of each breath.
Jerry Rose, a dental anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas, warned that a whole generation could be impacted if we don’t change course. “In evolution, there are winners and losers,” Rose said. We have to adapt, and adapt quickly, to our changing physiology — or risk the consequences.
“There are groups of people who simply went the wrong way,” Rose said. “And then they’re gone.”
https://onezero.medium.com/our-skulls-are-out-evolving-us-and-that-could-mean-a-public-health-crisis-f950faed696d
This seems developmental — prolonged thumb-sucking, the lack of chewing — rather than a true evolution, which has to involve genes.
Still scary. It's not normal for children to snore or mouth-breathe. But so many ideas of "normal" are changing.
Also: what about those other articles that state babies are being born larger and larger? It's hard to sort it all out.
*
ETHICS AND MORALITY SHOULD SERVE HUMAN NEEDS
“Ethics and morality should serve human needs, and choices should be based upon consideration of the consequences of actions rather than pre-ordained rules or commandments.” ~ from the description of Humanistic Judaism (also called “god-optional Judaism”)
A friend applauded the second part of the sentence: “choices should be based upon consideration of the consequences of actions rather than pre-ordained rules or commandments.” Of course I agree with that. True caring means considering the consequences rather than applying rigid rules. But it’s the first part that just stunned me: ETHICS AND MORALITY SHOULD SERVE HUMAN NEEDS. That the church never told me that is not surprising, since in its view, everything should serve the needs of the church. The dictatorial government certainly didn’t tell me, since everything should serve the needs of the government. Regardless, the first rule of survival rule was to keep quiet, so -- no discussion. It was only later that I saw how certain rules had nothing to do with ethics, and everything to do with the power structure.
Actually a seed of human need-based ethics is in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” I liked that saying very much, but didn’t dare generalize from it. Oh sure, it was OK to consider the needs of others as an opportunity for self-sacrifice. But if you had any personal needs, you were SELFISH and needed to go to confession.
It used to be much worse, I know — the “no divorce” rule, for instance. Or “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Or “donating” a child to a convent or monastery — why, that was seen as wonderful parental ethics. The bad old times — let’s face it, the past was mostly horrible, precisely because individual needs did not count.
Sometimes people’s need collide, and it gets complicated. But some sort of solution can be worked out so that neither party is miserable. I think we are moving away from “one size fits all” toward a more individualist view.
Since I’ve been asking myself what of Christianity is still of value to me, I’ve decided to add “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” as a seed of individualist, need-based ethics. Previously, I saw just two things, with all their implications: the story of the woman taken in adultery and “the kingdom of heaven is within you.” I’m adding the Sabbath saying. I’m not concerned with historical authenticity: let scholars argue about that. I’m concerned with extracting practical wisdom.
I never denied that there is wisdom in the Gospels. One nugget that I already cited: the Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath. Rituals are important, but not if they become oppressive and worsen our lives, already difficult. Simplify, simplify!
*
Rubens: Presentation of portrait of Marie de Medicis to Henry IV, 1625. What interests me is Jupiter and Juno up in the clouds — note the wonderful peacock (and the rather inadequate eagle, Jupiter’s bird). In order to glorify and elevate the royal marriage, Rubens (who was said to be a devout Catholic, going to mass every day before beginning to paint voluptuous plus-size naked women) had to reach for pagan gods — both the a-sexual Yahweh and Jesus present an anti-marriage ideal, and Mary remains a perpetual virgin.Finally, it's perhaps a little bizarre that the moment of presentation of the portrait of the future spouse was thought to be worth recording. But the world belonged to aristocracy, and they thought everything about them was extremely important.
Ending on beauty:
“A shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky, occasionally sprinkling a fine film of rain. I stand under an apple tree in blossom and I breathe. Not only the apple tree but the grass round it glistens with moisture; words cannot describe the sweet fragrance that pervades the air. I inhale as deeply as I can, and the aroma invades my whole being; I breathe with my eyes open, I breathe with my eyes closed-I cannot say which gives me the greater pleasure.
This, I believe, is the single most precious freedom that prison takes away from us; the freedom to breathe freely as I now can. No food on earth, no wine, not even a woman's kiss is sweeter to me than this air steeped in the fragrance of flowers, of moisture and freshness.
No matter that this is only a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-story houses like cages in a zoo. I cease to hear the motorcycles backing, radios whining, the burble of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh air to breathe under an apple tree after a shower, we may survive a little longer.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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