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Picasso: Absinthe Drinker, 1902. “My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso".
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LOVE DOES THAT
All day long a little donkey labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
donkeys.
And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.
Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,
he looks into the donkey’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the donkey is free
and even seems to laugh,
because love does
that.
Love Frees.
~ Meister Eckhart
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Let me quote again the delightful second part:
Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,
he looks into the donkey’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the donkey is free
and even seems to laugh,
because love does
that.
Love Frees.
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A friend made me aware that there is a movie by Robert Bresson, Au Hazard Balthazar, showing the life of a donkey. Some people abuse him, others treat him kindly, even lovingly. It seems mainly a matter of chance (hazard in French; “au hazard” means “at random”)
~ “Now here is the essential part. Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Because we can think and reason, we believe we can figure a way out, find a solution, get the answer. But intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.
This is the cinema of empathy.
The final scene of "Au Hasard Balthazar" makes that argument in a beautiful way. The donkey is old and near death, and wanders into a herd of sheep--as, indeed, it began its life in such a herd. The other animals come and go, sometimes nuzzling up against it, taking little notice, accepting this fellow animal, sharing the meadow and the sunshine. Balthazar lies down and eventually dies, as the sheep continue about their business. He has at last found a place where the other creatures think as he does.” ~
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-au-hasard-balthazar-1966
The Eternal Feminine: A Ukrainian woman with a chick
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Earliest known image of Nativity, 4th century; Milano, Sant’Ambroggio. Note the cow and the donkey — but no parents!
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BERTRAND RUSSELL: HOW TO GROW OLD WITHOUT FEAR OF DEATH
~ “The proper recipe for remaining young,” Russell says, came to him from the example of a maternal grandmother, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was growing old.”
~ The best way to overcome the fear of death—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done. ~ Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old
http://www.openculture.com/2018/12/bertrand-russells-advice-for-how-not-to-grow-old.html
Oriana:
Having wide interests (or even not so wide) is I think a form of love — you pay intense attention to something outside yourself. And, as Russell also said, “Love is wise and hatred foolish.” Having enough love in your life is probably more important than diet and exercise when it comes to health in general, and healthy older age in particular.
But we shouldn’t be obsessed with mere longevity. I knew a man who came from a family of near-centenarians, and who did indeed made it into the early nineties without any fitness or diet regimens (those are usually ineffective anyway; lots of “health nuts” end up dying rather young) — but he was domineering and downright abusive, and his old age was miserable.
His widow, by contrast, is a loving person with a strong creative bent. She loves her children and grandchildren and great-grands, but it seems to me that what really keeps her alive (she’s 92) and happy is her love of poetry, beauty, and nature. She keeps going to workshops and other poetry events, still publishes, still gives readings. True, she needs more and more assistance, but because of her sweetness, there are always people willing to help. They realize how extraordinary she is.
As for pursuing your passions, I love what Rilke said: “To work is to live without dying.”
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“THOSE WHO NEED A LIGHT FOR THE NIGHT”: HEMINGWAY’S STRUGGLE AGAINST DESPAIR
~ “I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
"I want to go home and into bed."
"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café."
"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."
"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."
"Good night," said the younger waiter.
"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity
although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too.
It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.” ~ Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Oriana:
Hemingway is usually discussed as an example of machismo and a certain kind of stoicism. But it might be more interesting to talk about his alcoholic desperation and nihilism, propped with principles like “grace under pressure” to substitute for genuine moral values. Thus, the place needs to be clean and well lighted. Granted, here at least we have some empathy for those who “need a light for the night” — but on the whole, one gets the impression that Hemingway is afraid of showing any kind of softer, more loving side of himself.
Moral values, my parents taught me, are about how you treat others. They have nothing to do with your bullfighting style, and everything to do with kindness, respect, a nurturing attitude toward the young and old — anyone in need of help. Courage, yes, in the face of true evil like the Nazis, not recklessness for the fun of it. Not senseless stubbornness, as when the Old Man ends up destroying a beautiful fish to prove how tough he is.
Granted, in this story (A Clean, Well-Lighted Place) at least we have some empathy for those who “need a light for the night” — but on the whole, in much of his work, one gets the impression that Hemingway is afraid of showing any kind of softer, more loving side of himself. (For one thing, he had his own literary legend to live up to: tough, macho.) Still, the older waiter does show empathy. What the old alcoholic needs is affection, and the older waiter gives him something like affection in the form of not trying to make him leave the premises.
Hematite “Iron Rose,” Spain
Mary:
It seems to me that what we need much more than “a clean, well lighted place” is, very simply, each other. Meister Eckhart’s parable of the monk and the donkey lays it out simply and perfectly...a moment of true attention, the kindness of touch. That is the miracle, the sweetness of redemption, the gesture of understanding, of empathy... Love. Not a bright and empty room with one inhabitant, preoccupied with his own concerns, certain of his own importance, his “genius.” That is a barren picture of isolation and egoism. I think you could starve there, could spend a lot of time wrestling with despair.
Why is it so hard to see our salvation lies in each other?? Love, empathy, connection, attention focused outward, toward the other, toward all the splendid wonders and mysteries of the world — kindness, curiosity, work that we love — these are redemptive, this is where you find freedom and create meaning. In these you are not self-conscious, self-absorbed, suffering the existential loneliness of the isolated eternally separate individual, but a partner in experience and understanding, sharing a world that is not empty, not cold, not indifferent: in fact, a world you are continually creating in the very act of your attention.
And this is not a huge and impossible task. It may be as small as that pear given to the donkey, as small as that gentle touch on the donkey's ear. For some, hell may be other people, but those others are also our best chance at heaven, maybe the only real one we ever get.
Oriana: NO SELF, NO PROBLEM
I’ve often wondered why it is so easy to love animals, and so difficult to relate to other people in a truly rewarding way. Humans may be too complex for their own good, and too divided along the lines of politics and religion, different philosophies of life, different preferences in music and art, and endless idiosyncratic opinions on just about everything. Add to this temperamental differences: the loud extravert versus the quiet introvert, for instance. When Adrienne Rich says, “Two people together is a miracle,” I instantly know what she means.
Yet this maddening complexity also means that practically every human being is fascinating. I discovered that a writer’s attitude — what makes this person tick? — keeps me from the instant intense dislike that used to plague my younger years. Curiosity rather than judgment, listening rather than “listening to yourself talk” — these are elements of maturity. When we listen, we discover points of common humanity, and empathy tends to be increase.
It is indeed the external focus that guards us against preoccupation with our faults, illnesses, fears and worries. Funny: I used to escape into my rich inner life to get away from the oppressive externals. Now I’ve learned to escape into the external — which can be as simple as looking out the window, “gazing at the world” — to get away from oppressive preoccupation with the self.
This key was formulated by a Buddhist sage who said: “No self, no problem.” Every woman should have that taped to her mirror, since women have been brainwashed to think they need to spend hours perfecting their appearance. The beauty of young women is indeed part of the beauty of the world, but pity the woman (and an occasional man) who hasn’t developed in other ways.
But external focus is broader than human interaction. Affection is very important — or, if affection is too difficult, just close listening — but thank goodness there is also work. Our salvation lies both in work AND affection. As Freud said, when asked what’s most important in life: “Love and work.”
Magritte: The Lovers, 1928. We can never fully know another person, but . . . long live the mystery.
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But the minimalism in Hemingway’s short stories, wow, the influence of that.
HIS GREATNESS LIES IN HIS STORIES
~ “Reviewing the 1977 film version of Islands in the Stream, Pauline Kael wrote, “There may be a time for a Hemingway revival, but this isn’t it. His themes don’t link with our preoccupations and… the movie version of his posthumous novel seems to belong to another age.” Kael was right, but she missed something: Another age is precisely why many still read Hemingway.
In the ’80s, writes Mary Dearborn in her richly detailed biography, “Hemingway and his place in the Western literary tradition came under full-on attack, as readers, scholars, urgently questioned what ‘dead white males’ like Hemingway have to say to us in a multicultural era that no longer accords them automatic priority. The so-called Hemingway code—a tough, stoic approach to life that seemingly substitutes physical courage … for other forms of accomplishments—increasingly looked insular and tiresomely macho.”
In the 21st century, thanks to movies, his image is more with us than ever. In Midnight in Paris (2011) Corey Stoll conjures an uncanny likeness of the mid-’20s Hemingway with a boost from Woody Allen’s spot-on dialogue: “It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that’s what war does to men. There’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it’s not only noble but brave.”
And: “No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”
The next year HBO aired Philip Kaufman’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, about Papa’s tempestuous relationship with his third wife, the journalist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Nicole Kidman gives a powerhouse performance as the only one of Hemingway’s four wives who was a match for him in intelligence and temperament, and Clive Owen is the most complete and nuanced of the numerous cinematic Hemingways (though Dominic West delivers a vivid cameo in Genius, a film bio of the remarkable editor Max Perkins).
Martha Gellhorn thought, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”
Did—does—Hemingway qualify as a genius? He certainly thought he did. But perhaps his greatest lie was to himself. In a letter to one of his editors, he wrote that if writing was boxing, he had a chance to beat “Mr. Tolstoy,” and “I fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal …” I saw those fights and Stendhal won two unanimous decisions and Tolstoy by a third round KO.
His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), still reads with the freshness of an open wound (when I say first, I’m excluding the unreadable The Torrents of Spring). But it’s tough to read the big books on which Hemingway’s reputation has so long rested—A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)—without noticing how stagey and melodramatic they seem.
Surely it’s his short stories that will keep Hemingway’s literary reputation alive. Even his severest critics concede a value in the stories lacking in the novels. Nabokov told an interviewer, “I read him for the first time in the early ‘40s, something about bells, balls and bulls …” Nabokov considered Hemingway and Joseph Conrad “writers of books for boys.” But Hemingway was better than Conrad: “He has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story ‘The Killers.’” He also thought that the “description of the iridescent fish and its rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb.” Go fish, Dwight Macdonald.
One of the conceits that holds up is his comparison of himself to Cezanne. In the introduction to the recent Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, his grandson Sean writes, “My grandfather liked to compare his writing to Cezanne’s painting. He said that he learned how to write landscapes from Cezanne, whose work he saw in Paris as a young man.”
And, pretty much, he’s right. This edition offers multiple drafts (from the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston) that show how the author polished his jewels. He learned from many sources, from the great and underrated Ring Lardner (whose name he adopted for his high school newspaper), Stein, Ezra Pound (who, Dearborn says, “taught him to be leery of adjectives, a mistrust that would become an essential part of the Hemingway style”), and not the least, from the style manual he learned as a reporter for the Kansas City Star—use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English. Also, and surely one of few rules he and Nabokov both adhered to, avoid words that end in “ly.”
In an early draft of "Big Two-Hearted River," he pays homage to Cezanne: “He wanted to write like Cezanne painted.” But he excised that sentence from his final version. In his early stories he succeeded in capturing the literary quality of Cezanne’s technique of focusing on background, subordinating central objects and outlines to detail.
The art of Hemingway, the innovation that marked him—along with Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, and other post-World War I modernists—is to be found in his stories, not in the increasingly archaic-seeming novels. Hemingway subscribed to the “iceberg principle” of writing: “The dignity of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” As Sean Hemingway notes, “Big Two-Hearted River” is a story about World War I in which the war is never mentioned.
Applying it to fiction, he meant that an author must keep his narrative short as the very nature of the medium dictated compression. In his Poetry Notebook, Clive James found from a lifetime of studying poetry “the intensity of language that marked the real difference between poetry and prose.” Open one of Hemingway’s novels just about anywhere and you will find language that is flowery and overwritten; flip to any pages in one of his great short stories and find poetry (much better poetry than Hemingway managed in his verse).
Yeats liked to quote a remark attributed to John Stewart Mill: “Rhetoric is heard. Poetry is overheard.” Hemingway’s stories seem overheard. You can see this demonstrated in the versions reprinted in the Short Stories, where each draft becomes more concise and better as he revises.
It’s time to acknowledge that Fitzgerald came nearer to greatness as a novelist than Hemingway, and that Hemingway never wrote a novel as good as The Great Gatsby (which T.S. Eliot thought was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”). Hemingway ended his career as he had begun, as an inspired adolescent. He burned with a hard gemlike flame for perhaps ten years, roughly from 1925 to the mid-1930s, and what he wrote after that coasted on the momentum of his extravagant influence. Is it even possible to imagine Faulkner doing an endorsement for Ballantine Ale, as Hemingway did in 1952?
But I also know that there’s an art in Hemingway’s stories that surpasses the novels, one that can’t be explained simply by reciting influences like Stein, the KC Star Style Manual, or even Cezanne. In his stories, Hemingway lit a torch to the path of literary modernism. As a novelist, his attitudes were those of an earlier time. Like a beefy, bearded Janus, his image will always stand at the crossroads of 19th and 20th century American literature.” ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-the-hell-are-we-still-reading-ernest-hemingway?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
Oriana:
The fishing stories didn't interest me, but a few others did. And yes, the minimalist style, the influence of journalism. I too learned about short sentences and short paragraphs from journalism. Copy editing was by far the most useful class I ever took.
The Sun Also Rises was one of those novels that was an experience to read. Not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. Again, alcoholism that grasps at the straws of principles, e.g. being a “good drunk.” Being a good drunk is certainly better than being a bad drunk, but it’s still no substitute for having a genuine moral compass.
Nevertheless, when dealing with writers, we must remember that ultimately they will be remembered (IF they are remembered) for their best work, and not for the mediocre work that may have made them famous while they were alive. And Hemingway did say a few things worth remembering:
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
Remedios Varo: The Troubadour
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PORN, VIDEO GAMES, AND MALE ALIENATION
~ “There has been a lot of recent research on how online porn and video games are helping to inculcate alienation and destructive patterns in boys and young men. Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo's book Man (Dis)Connected): How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to be Male provides insight onto how Homo Obnoxious gets his brain wired.
Zimbardo discusses how young male brains can become shaped at a cellular level in ways that inhibit their social development through excessive time spent on gaming and porn, even losing their ability to read the social cues of face-to-face contact. Many, he points out, are drawn to these realms as a seemingly safe and easy way to gain a sense of achievement that may not be available in the winner-take-all competition of school and the workforce. These virtual worlds are tailored to provide an addictive system of goals and rewards that produce guys who are afraid of intimacy. They end up eschewing real-world experiments that might result in rejection, and real-time spontaneity that leaves them disoriented and frightened. Drained of self-confidence, they search for narratives of manhood that provide at least the simulacrum of power and dignity.” ~
http://www.alternet.org/culture/homo-obnoxious-toxic-masculinity-really-taking-over-country
Boy angel at La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires
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~ “While on assignment for Der Spiegel, we made a road trip through Syria to document the current situation in major cities. When I first entered the Khalidiya district in Homs, I was shocked. I hadn’t seen such large-scale destruction before, and I had been to many destroyed cities. The area around the Khalidiya district was extremely quiet. No city sounds, cars—nothing. Only the chirping of swallows and the wind. We walked down the streets of Khalidiya, but the destruction was so widespread that you couldn’t get the big picture from the street—you could only manage it with a view from above. To make this image, I asked a Syrian soldier in charge of the area if I could climb onto a ruin. The soldier agreed, allowing me to climb at my own risk. I climbed up the ruins of a former house—which was full of improvised explosive devices—and took the picture. I was very lucky to take the picture when I was on the rooftop. Without any sign of life, it would have been a dead picture. I can recall the memory vividly.” ~ Christian Werner
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THE BATTLE OF VERDUN, FEBRUARY 21-DECEMBER 18, 1916
The Battle of Verdun remains one of the deadliest confrontations in the annals of warfare, producing crippling losses on both sides of the battlefield.
The battle was the brainchild of General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the Imperial German General Staff. He believed that Germany could win the war if it could smash France’s army in one massive confrontation. He chose Verdun as the place to “bleed it white” both because its location in northeastern France made it susceptible to mass artillery fire and because as one of France’s major citadels its loss would crush French morale.
Early fighting went as Falkenhayn had hoped. German forces took several French forts and came within two miles of the center of Verdun. By July, however, the German advance had bogged down. With the British having launched a separate offensive against German troops at the Somme at the start of July, Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Falkenhayn as chief of staff.
The French army slowly began to push the Germans back. By the time the fighting halted in December, the two armies had returned to nearly the same lines they had held at the start of the year. In the meantime, they had each suffered more than 330,000 casualties.
Verdun: Military Cemetery and Ossuary
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Let’s detox with this story:
~ “I grew up on farms and still miss horses so much that it actually causes me pain. I watched my teeny 5 foot nothing mother calm the meanest stallions just by simply walking towards them talking in her soothing tone and holding a carrot. One day a man showed up at the farm hauling a trailer and we could hear an angry horse screaming in it. All these men yelling and trying to get it out....my mother appeared on the porch the second the owner took a whip to the backside of the horse yelling horrible things at it in an attempt to get it out of the trailer. First time I ever saw my mother lose her temper, and since we were McMahon's her temper was fierce. She marched up to that man, yanked the whip from him and proceeded to repeatedly hit him in the face with it. Shoved him back and firmly said "Now watch how it is SUPPOSED to be done" and vanished into the trailer. The men are yelling the horse is a killer...then they fell silent. Mother was in there crooning to the horse, who was literally crying, stroking its neck and looking it in the eyes..she's crying with the horse. Backed him gentle like out of the trailer and led him to the barn. Walked past our landlord and told him "If I see that man step one foot on this property again I will shoot him dead. This horse is no longer his." I was staring in astonishment at this horse...it was HUGE...20 hands easily. And it was following my mother like a pussy cat. The man never came back...and that horse was the best friend a girl could ever have.” ~ Jana Bramble, Facebook
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THE SEEDS OF LOVE CONTAIN THE ROOTS OF HATE
~ “In a book titled Virtuous Violence by Tage Rai and Alan Fiske, the authors claim that violence is mostly morally driven. People are violent because of their morality, not in spite of it.
Moral Violence
As they put it, “When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.”
They go on to write, “The perpetrator is violent to make the relationship right—to make the relationship what it ought to be according to his or her cultural implementations of universal relational moral principles. That is, most violence is morally motivated. Morality is about regulating social relationships, and violence is one way to regulate relationships.”
Plainly, perpetrators believe a social relationship has somehow gone wrong, and are morally motivated to put it right. This can drive them to do violence.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister discusses a related idea. In his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Baumeister reviews scientific and historical texts.
He concludes that for the most part, people who commit violence view themselves as victims and their targets as moral wrongdoers. Again, for the perpetrators violence is morally motivated.
No one is the bad guy in their own movie.
THE TWO FACES OF OXYTOCIN
Researchers have proposed that the biological prototype for all sociality among mammals can be found in mother-infant interactions. Evolution co-opted the parts of our brain that engage during these early interactions and use them for the rest of our social relationships.
But the love molecule is not always so lovely. Studies have found that oxytocin can increase aggression and hostility to those perceived as threats.
As Matthew Lieberman puts it, “In nonprimates, oxytocin leads individuals to see all outsiders as possible threats, thus enhancing aggression toward them.”
And administering oxytocin to humans “facilitates caregiving toward both liked groups and strangers, but it promotes hostility toward members of disliked groups.”
suggests we can’t have strong commitment without a greater risk of violence. Put differently, we can’t reduce violence without weakening commitment.
If people are not so committed in a relationship, that means the relationship isn’t very important. And if a relationship is unimportant, people are less likely to risk using violence.
More choices→ lower likelihood of commitment
Less commitment→ lower likelihood of violence
Fewer choices→ higher likelihood of commitment
Higher commitment→ higher likelihood of violence
The idea that morality motivates violence, or that violence occurs more frequently in important relationships seems counterintuitive. But a crucial point emphasized in Virtuous Violence and Evil is that understanding the roots of violence can help us to reduce it.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201812/the-seeds-love-contain-the-roots-hate
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“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” ~ Samuel Johnson
Remedios Varo: Embroidering the Earth's Mantle (I realize that the reader is expecting an image of Samuel Johnson here, but this is so much more pleasing)
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THE CASE FOR A 6-HOUR WORKDAY
~ “The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, and the industrial revolution saw children as young as six-years-old working the coal mines, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week, eventually ratifying it as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
So much has changed since then. The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, says that “the more complex and creative jobs are, the less it makes sense to pay attention to hours at all.” Yet despite all of this, the eight-hour workday still reigns supreme. “Like most humans,” Grant says, “leaders are remarkably good at anchoring on the past even when it’s irrelevant to the present.”
Heuristic work requires people to get into the physiological state of flow, coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975. Flow refers to the state of full immersion in an activity, and you might know it best as “the zone.” A 10-year McKinsey study on flow found that top executives are up to 500% more productive when they’re in a state of flow.
Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance, with research by Adobe finding that employees spend an average of six hours per day on email. Another study found that the average employee checks email 74 times a day, while people touch their smartphones 2,617 times a day. Employees are in a constant state of distraction and hyper-responsiveness.
Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp and author of It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, said on my podcast, Future Squared, that for creative jobs such as programming and writing, people need time to truly think about the work that they’re doing. “If you asked them when the last time they had a chance to really think at work was, most people would tell you they haven’t had a chance to think in quite a long time, which is really unfortunate.”
“People waste a lot of time at work,” according to Grant. “I’d be willing to bet that in most jobs, people would get more done in six focused hours than eight unfocused hours.”
Cal Newport, best-selling author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, echoes Grant’s sentiments, saying that “three to four hours of continuous, undisturbed deep work each day is all it takes to see a transformational change in our productivity and our lives.”
Fried agreed, saying that he gets into flow for about half the day. “If you don’t get a good four hours of flow to yourself a day, putting more hours in isn’t going to make up for it. It’s just not true that if you stay at the office longer you get more work done.”
I conducted a two-week, six-hour workday experiment with my team at Collective Campus, an innovation accelerator based in Melbourne, Australia. The shorter workday forced the team to prioritize effectively, limit interruptions, and operate at a much more deliberate level for the first few hours of the day. The team maintained, and in some cases increased, its quantity and quality of work, with people reporting an improved mental state, and that they had more time for rest, family, friends, and other endeavors.
When I announced the experiment on LinkedIn, a connection responded with: “It’s nice in theory, but I can’t finish all of my tasks in six hours!” — as if all tasks were created equally. The law of nature that is the Pareto principle stipulates that about 20% of your tasks will create about 80% of the value, so it’s about focusing on those high-value tasks.
Make it okay for employees to not be in a hyper-responsive state and schedule uninterrupted time to get into a state of flow. Similarly, make it not okay to be interrupting people on a whim. My team has a simple rule; if a team member has their headphones in, you are not to disturb them unless it absolutely, positively can’t wait (which is hardly ever, by the way). Doing so has been shown to decrease workplace stress, according to research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, which found that stress levels declined when email was taken away from U.S. Army civilian employees for five days, because they felt more in control of their working lives.
By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.” ~
https://hbr.org/2018/12/the-case-for-the-6-hour-workday
Strasbourg Cathedral
*
“When someone asks you what country you are from, never say that you are Athenian or Corinthian, but rather that you are a citizen of the world [kosmios]” ~ Epictetus, Discourses 1.9
Oriana:
I love "Kosmios" -- it makes me think of the cosmos as the universe, and of course in the largest sense we are the children of the universe -- every atom inside us was once inside a star.
JESUS AS THE CRITIC OF RELIGION
~ “Has it ever occurred to you how fundamentally iconoclastic Jesus really was? How bitterly anti-establishment he was? He had exactly zero qualms about questioning every single thing the religious people around him believed.
Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” (Mark 7:6-7)
Granted, he had his inconsistencies like most other composite characters in works of dubious historical accuracy. Serious scholars of every stripe have long admitted to seeing multiple competing layers of tradition in the stories and sayings of Jesus we find in the canonical gospels.
But no matter what the comparative authenticity of those disparate layers, there is one thing about which we can be relatively certain, namely that the version(s) of Jesus we find in the Bible today preserve for us the very ideas which, if carried to their logical conclusions, will lead any serious follower to be critical of the religious apparatus that today represents the faith he was supposed to have founded.
Jesus, the Critic of Religion
Whether or not you are convinced he actually existed, Jesus rightly belongs to a prophetic tradition within the Jewish faith that was always calling out its leaders for allowing the religion to major on obsessions which benefit no one save those at the top of the religious order.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are…
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. ‘
I submerged myself into the life and teachings of Jesus many years ago, and if I took away nothing else, it was that the most Jesus-like thing you could do is to critically analyze what you’ve been taught to believe in order to sift and sort out the man-made stuff from the authentic roots of your belief system.
Consider how many times in his famous “Sermon on the Mount” Jesus quoted the Hebrew scriptures only to turn around and disagree with it!
“You have heard it said…but I say to you..”
That takes a lot of nerve, you know? Interpreters today seem content with a facile dismissal of this tendency because, hey, it’s Jesus, right? I mean surely he enjoys a special privilege because of who he is, and he had no intention of teaching us to do the same things he did, right?
I find that intellectually lazy. And the thing is…once you get started on this project, you may find that pulling on that thread soon leads to the whole fabric coming undone. So be it. Your journey may not take you that far, but mine did.
In Mark’s gospel (we literally have no idea who wrote this despite what you may have heard) we read Jesus asking why ceremonial prayers (whoops, I mean washings) before meals would have any effect at all on the holiness of the food. Jesus thinks out loud for us, modeling the kinds of critical thinking skills he wants his listeners to emulate:
“Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing which enters a person from the outside can defile them? It doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.”
(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean)
Do you see what Jesus just did? He used logic to deconstruct a religious belief and threw it right back in the faces of the men who stood to gain from preserving the traditions people had been following for centuries, never questioning anything because they were taught that doing so was bad form. And yet here is Jesus, modeling the whole process himself. According to the Bible itself here, the man just called into question all of the kosher food laws of his family’s religion.
My point is that Jesus got me started on the road to questioning what I believe. I find that deliciously ironic since I only listened to what he had to say because the people whose authority he taught me to question never seemed to realize how much what he had to say was undermining their authority.
At the end of one of the passages I quoted above, Jesus says:
Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.
Much has been said about this cryptic statement, and about what this “key to knowledge” must have signified. Personally, I feel it’s possible he meant that critical thinking skills would have enabled the people of Israel to evaluate what they had been taught but that trust in authority had divested them of that capability.” ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2017/11/25/bible-helped-become-atheist/?fbclid=IwAR1I_vwEqVDNa_moDeHAjcZ6mWzNvAa99sZA920vONa6pPRbxEWBGzzLDjQ#srcu6pKFASMoVT3w.01
SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT THE DECLINE IN GRIP STRENGTH?
~ “When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded via a hand-held dynamometer, were “not anywhere close to the norms” that had been established back in the 1980s.
Fain knew that physical activity levels and hand-use patterns had changed a lot since then. Jobs had become increasingly automated, the professional and service sectors had grown, all sorts of measures of physical activity (like the likelihood that a child walks to school) had declined, and the personal computer age had dawned. But to see the numbers decline so steeply and quickly was still a surprise, and not just to her.
Even taking into account the cautionary statistical notes—that the sample sizes of the 1980s studies were not huge, that Fain’s study was mostly college students—the idea of a loss in human strength, expressed through a statistical measure hardly anyone had previously heard of, seemed to hint at some latter-day version of degeneration. It’s easy to be troubled by a nearly 20 percent decrease in grip strength, especially given that it happened in one generation.
That message was reinforced by the sheer predictive power of grip strength. In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength.3 Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”
The argument seemed to line up neatly. We are raising a generation of weaklings, more prone to everything from premature aging to mental disorders. Or is the opposite true? Is this just the latest step in the age-old weakening of our species as we emerged from the trees and built up civilization?
Pound per pound, babies are remarkably strong. The parent learns this the first time they proffer their finger. In a famous series of experiments in the late 19th century—of the sort one can scarcely imagine today—Louis Robinson, a surgeon at a children’s hospital in England, tested some 60 infants—many within an hour of birth—by having them hang from a suspended “walking stick.” With only two exceptions, according to one report, the infants were able to hang on, sustaining “the weight of their body for at least ten seconds.” Many could do it for upward of a minute. In a later-published photograph, Robinson swapped out the bar for a tree branch, to bring home his whole point: Our “arboreal ancestry.”
The last 10 years have also seen a dramatic increase in myopia, most likely because we spend more time indoors and because of the type of work we do. But should we stop reading? Should we swing from the trees to get our grip strength back? Even if we got our paleo hands back, what good would they do us in the modern world?
And if a measure like grip strength were truly so robust a health indicator, shouldn’t life spans be declining as (and if) grip strength was? Bohannon warns me, “I would not interpret small declines in grip strength as indicative of decreasing health.” As he notes, you have to get pretty low in the statistical profile—“in the lowest quartile or tertile or below the median of a tested population”—before you start to get into increased mortality risk territory.
Despite all these caveats, there is a larger narrative into which declining grip strength fits neatly. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard University paleoanthropologist, and author of The Story of the Human Body, tells me that “overall strength and fitness are declining in the post-industrial world, and the epidemiological transition is increasing lifespan.” But, he noted, “those two trends are occurring for totally different reasons.”
We tend to fixate on the measure of lifespan, but overlook morbidity. Here, Lieberman says, the data are unequivocal. “As we are living longer,” he says, people “are also suffering from much longer periods of chronic illness as they age.” People may be living longer, due to advances in pharmaceuticals or medical care, but as he asks, “is she/he healthy?” Health, he says, “is not just life expectancy.”
Our weakening grips are, if nothing else, a corollary of an increasingly sick population. So, by all means, go to the gym, not to turn back the evolutionary tide, but for your own well-being. Evolution, as Lieberman reminds us in The Story of the Human Body, is just about passing your genes, not ensuring a long and healthy life. “From an evolutionary perspective, there is no such thing as optimal health.” Creating that definition is up to you.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/raising-the-american-weakling-1601106883
ending on beauty:
I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands even at the height
of their arc of rage
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh
we can wound
and it is our
Beloved’s.
~ Hafiz, I Have Come into This World to See This
Vittorio Zecchin: From the cycle Thousand and One Nights, 1914
**
PLEASE FORGIVE
Please forgive my leaving before
the reading even started, furious, almost
foaming at the mouth like a holy fool
or a character out of Dostoyevski.
I regret not having stayed. I regret
being a character out of Dostoyevski:
a God-obsessed atheist. Raskolnikov
is my lost tenth cousin. We have long
conversations, Rodya and I,
and Ivan Karamazov. And Svidrigailov,
who says, But suppose eternity
is like a grimy Russian bathhouse,
with dried-up spiders in the corners?
who calls suicide “going to America” —
he’s my secret love. Unable to see me
across the Neva, ignorant that he is loved,
he chooses to go to America —
That’s my luck with men, though sometimes
before they go, they say Remember only
the beauty. And Fyodor, my Fyodor,
sweeping the dried-up spiders
from the corners of eternity,
says through the mouth of Myshkin,
“the idiot”: Beauty will save the world.
~ Oriana
That surprising statement in The Idiot remains little known. It speaks deeply to someone like myself who doesn’t really separate beauty from goodness, and who understands that Oscar Wilde wasn’t merely joking when he said, “I know why there is so much violence in America: it’s because their wallpaper is so ugly.”
I also understood Thomas Moore, author of The Care of the Soul, when he said that a church need to be immaculately clean: “A dirty church doesn’t work.”
But I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that the idea of beauty was central for Dostoyevski. His big theme, aside from the question of religious belief, was the primacy of kindness, of human values, as opposed to any rationalist ideologies that end up becoming totalitarian catastrophes, attracting charismatic psychopaths (The Devils).
And this is of course the writer adored by the Existentialists because of Notes from the Underground (1864), the Underground Man being perhaps the first modern anti-hero, a bitter, isolated man who ridicules utopian idealists. But besides the Underground Man, Dostoyevski also gave us the Ridiculous Man who ends up yearning for paradise — understood as a place where everyone is kind.
Mary:
Your opening poem and discussion of Dostoyevski is irresistible to me. I read Crime and Punishment first as a teenage girl who found herself unable to pray, unable to even pretend to pray, when it was required and expected as part of the day's routine at my all girls Catholic high school.
The problem of suffering, in particular the suffering of the innocents, grounded in my own experience of childhood abuse, but expanding to include more and more of humanity as I became more aware of the pain in the world, at first led me to anger at a god so cruel and indifferent. This was followed by contempt — what sort of thing is a god less kind and compassionate than his creatures? A useless impossibility.
So already a "god-obsessed atheist," I was thunderstruck by Raskolnikov's struggles — captivated by his questions — felt he was indeed a long lost cousin, maybe a brother, whose extreme actions resulted from the extremity of his thinking, the dangerous and forbidden thoughts that were nevertheless undeniable, irresistible, unshakable. I felt at home with him there, at the apostate's table. My friends were writing "Ralph" and "Johnnie," their boyfriends names, on their notebooks and book covers, I covered mine with "Raskolnikov," as though Rodya was a friend I might meet at a local dance.
I felt at home in Dostoyevski's world, where people lived with fevered intensity, concerned with the essential, terrible question at the heart of life — not the question of good and evil, the question of suffering.
The why and how of it in a world where the worst pain is often visited on children — Raskolnikov opened the door for me, then The Brothers Karamazov blew the roof off. No matter how kind we can be, how loving, Ivan's argument goes unanswered. The children are crucified, the horse is beaten to death, and gentle Myshkin is "The Idiot," finally succumbs to the damage of his seizures. For me the questions Dostoyevski raises are more powerful than his answers, although I have nothing better to replace them. The glory and wonder of the world is in its richness, its particulars, the vulnerability and lovability of each and all. The possibility of kindness is perhaps our best and most important sacrament.
When I think of those times now I must admit I am far from all that 'fevered intensity." I think it may be one of those lovely perks of aging . . . things are calmer, slower, less frantic, more measured. There is room here for beauty, and kindness, curiosity and wonder, and we know now how useless and wasteful are guilt and regret.
Oriana:
I love the way you put it and I agree: kindness is indeed “our best and most important sacrament.” And it stems from empathy, not religious commandments or ideological doctrines.
Dostoyevsky vacillated all his life between belief and non-belief, but after writing Ivan’s speech in Brothers Karamazov, he boasted that no one has ever presented a better case for atheism. And this was long before Auschwitz, and before I, for one, understood that if god allowed Auschwitz, god will allow anything — and certainly couldn’t care less about the suffering of one abused child.
But to me the main part of Dostoyevski’s genius was his compelling arguments against blind devotion to any abstract cause — be it ideology or religion — ahead of the importance of human beings — even if that human being is a “useless old woman.” 
View fom Raskolnikov's window in St. Petersburg; Inge Morath, 1967
*
DOSTOYEVSKI’S “THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN”
~ “One November night in the 1870s, Fyodor Dostoyevsky discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece explores themes similar to those in Dostoyevsky’s 1864 Notes from the Underground, considered the first true existential novel.
The story begins with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg on “a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive,” dwelling on how others have ridiculed him all his life and slipping into nihilism with the “terrible anguish” of believing that nothing matters. He peers into the glum sky, gazes at a lone little star, and contemplates suicide; two months earlier, despite his destitution, he had bought an “excellent revolver” with the same intention, but the gun had remained in his drawer since. Suddenly, as he is staring at the star, a little girl of about eight, wearing ragged clothes and clearly in distress, grabs him by the arm and inarticulately begs his help. But the protagonist, disenchanted with life, shoos her away and returns to the squalid room he shares with a drunken old captain, furnished with “a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair.”
As he sinks into the easy-chair to think about ending his life, he finds himself haunted by the image of the little girl, leading him to question his nihilistic disposition. Dostoyevsky writes:
~ I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table — that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.
You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation…
It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed?
From the moral, he veers into the existential:
It became clear to me that life and the world, as it were, depended upon me. I might even say that the world had existed for me alone. I should shoot myself, and then there would be no world at all, for me at least. Not to mention that perhaps there will really be nothing for any one after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, will also be extinguished like a phantom, as part of my consciousness only, and be utterly abolished, since perhaps all this world and all these men are myself alone.
Beholding “these new, thronging questions,” he plunges into a contemplation of what free will really means. In a passage that calls to mind John Cage’s famous aphorism on the meaning of life — “No why. Just here.” — and George Lucas’s assertion that “life is beyond reason,” Dostoyevsky suggests through his protagonist that what gives meaning to life is life itself:
One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth — would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.
Just as he ponders this, the protagonist slips into sleep in the easy-chair, but it’s a sleep that has the quality of wakeful dreaming. In one of many wonderful semi-asides, Dostoyevsky peers at the eternal question of why we have dreams:
Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all — space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart… In a dream things quite incomprehensible come to pass. For instance, my brother died five years ago. Sometimes I see him in a dream: he takes part in my affairs, and we are very excited, while I, all the time my dream goes on, know and remember perfectly that my brother is dead and buried. Why am I not surprised that he, though dead, is still near me and busied about me? Why does my mind allow all that?
In this strange state, the protagonist dreams that he takes his revolver and points it at his heart — not his head, where he had originally intended to shoot himself. After waiting a second or two, his dream-self pulls the trigger quickly. Then something remarkable happens:
I felt no pain, but it seemed to me that with the report, everything in me was convulsed, and everything suddenly extinguished. It was terribly black all about me. I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard. I could see nothing, neither could I make any sound. People were walking and making a noise about me: the captain’s bass voice, the landlady’s screams… Suddenly there was a break. I am being carried in a closed coffin. I feel the coffin swinging and I think about that, and suddenly for the first time the idea strikes me that I am dead, quite dead. I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without a question.
Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.
“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom.”
I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights. ~
Through the thick darkness, he sees a star — the same little star he had seen before shooing the girl away. As the dream continues, the protagonist describes a sort of transcendence akin to what is experienced during psychedelic drug trips or in deep meditation states:
Suddenly a familiar yet most overwhelming emotion shook me through. I saw our sun. I knew that it could not be our sun, which had begotten our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away, but somehow all through me I recognized that it was exactly the same sun as ours, its copy and double. A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.
He finds himself in another world, Earthlike in every respect, except “everything seemed to be bright with holiday, with a great and sacred triumph, finally achieved” — a world populated by “children of the sun,” happy people whose eyes “shone with a bright radiance” and whose faces “gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.” The protagonist exclaims:
Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!
Conceding that “it was only a dream,” he nonetheless asserts that “the sensation of the love of those beautiful and innocent people” was very much real and something he carried into wakeful life on Earth. Awaking in his easy-chair at dawn, he exclaims anew with rekindled gratitude for life:
Oh, now — life, life! I lifted my hands and called upon the eternal truth, not called, but wept. Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being. Yes, to live…
Dostoyevsky concludes with his protagonist’s reflection on the shared essence of life, our common conquest of happiness and kindness:
All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.
And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.
A century later, Jack Kerouac would echo this in his own magnificent meditation on kindness and the “Golden Eternity.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-day-dostoyevsky-discovered-the-meaning-of-life-in-a-dream-762477006
Nepal. Who doesn’t love the story of Shangri-La?
Oriana:
What this summary omits is the middle part of the story, in which the narrator lives among the innocent inhabitants of the Edenic planet — and somehow teaches them to lie (it’s a little unclear how this happens —he’s being playful rather than malicious). Lying leads to other transgressions, including the first murder, and eventually war. The narrator blames himself and asks the corrupted former innocents to kill him, the real culprit — but they won’t do it. He wakes up a changed man, decides to try to find the little girl, and to dedicate himself to practicing kindness and preaching brotherhood.
I remember how my mother remarked during a party that ultimately it all comes down to simply being kind to one another. There were some extremely bright people in the room, mostly scientists. One said, “Isn’t it disappointing — centuries of searching for an answer, and it’s no more than that.” But others said, “Disappointing or not, that is the best answer and the greatest wisdom: the most important thing is to be kind.”
I also remember that someone said, on a different occasion, “Heaven is a place where everyone is kind.”
*
“When he died in the railway station at Astapovo, Tolstoy had two books with him — "The Brothers Karamazov" and Montaigne’s "Essays." Try to think of two more dissimilar writers, or less compatible texts. This makes sense, of course. Tolstoy was the ultimate fideist, human embodiment of consistent inconsistency and self-contradiction at the level of genius in his thinking.” ~ M. Iossel
“Alyosha's hymn affirming the resurrection of the dead on the last pages of The Brothers K. is a fideist leap into the void. Dostoyevsky's unbelievers, like Ivan K., are much more credible.” ~ Peter Heinegg
*
The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody. ~ Rita Mae Brown
*
“Memory is the mirror that scandalously lies.” ~ Julio Cortazar
I don’t know what the inscription says, but 1) I love the script, and 2) it’s possible that says “I don’t walk; the road walks.” It's time someone gave some credit to the road!
*
~ “May the last convulsions of the Rebel South and the emotionally crippled Fifties’ American male may not be the last convulsions of humankind.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
*
DICTATOR SHIC: THE ESTHETICS OF TOTALITARIANISM
~ “Presenters would languish unironically over the Versailles-inspired design of Trump’s New York penthouse, a gilded, gross thing bedecked with some art and lots of replicas. Faux rococo. Much was made of his tremendous concern with aesthetics. “Tremendous” and “beautiful,” I’d learn in 2016, were some of his favorite words, along with “huge” and “classy”—a furore of superlatives, reflecting him, the objects he likes, the towers he built, his image. Very dictator-chic.
Hitler and his obsession with size immediately came to mind. “Why always the biggest? I do this to restore to each individual German his self-respect,” he once said. The Third Reich was a project of national remaking and re-dignifying, after all, and while most dictators seek to remold “their” country in their image, Hitler and Trump are remarkably similar in the way aesthetics take prime place in their lives and policies.
If Trump had a Pinterest board, it would be full of images from Louis XIV’s Versailles; Hitler’s was ancient Greece and Rome. Architecture and aesthetics were central concerns of both men, who favored structures that would exemplify absolute power: the former as the gaudy manifestation of luxury in a time where citizens were dying of poverty (in 2018 as in the 1700s), the latter embodying the strict, towering totalitarian ideal that demanded absolute subservience and absolute fear. It is no coincidence, either, that both nationalists have aesthetic ideals that stem from foreign cultures of a lost time. These symbols of grandeur are not homegrown: they are part of a project of white European myth-making, and myth—in Trump’s America and in Hitler’s Germany—is everything.
Myth was the narrative that enabled Hitler to meld aesthetics with politics and technology—Jewish liquidation was part of the Third Reich’s “beautifying project,” after all, to purge the mythical Germanic land from contamination, and in so doing remake the German state and sublimate the German people. Trump is engaged in the same triple blending: migrants are a (racial) threat to (pure, beautiful) Western civilization, which Trump will protect (beautiful, white) America from by building a Beautiful Tremendously Big Wall.
This commingling of aesthetics, politics and science wasn’t original to Hitler: he had simply inherited a 200-year-old cultural and historical legacy.
That legacy stretches back to the German Enlightenment. Its proponents believed that progress was attainable through education and science and that everything could be measured, controlled, and planned. One could master nature. There was an objective truth that could be discovered. There was the sense that Germany could move past the shame caused by the devastating Thirty Years’ War.
Romanticism emerged as a counter-movement, claiming that Enlightenment had disenchanted the world through science, technology, efficiency. Romantics preferred intuition, the unconscious, transcendence, the idea of free will, creative genius, irrationalism. They cherished Kant’s diktat, where a free man was one who obeyed the laws of his own making. They believed that to be “German” was to have a particular “ethnic soul” and that folk tales and songs would allow them to access it. They would elevate those tales into mythology.
Later, Nietzsche, believing the Romantics soft, called for an Übermensch, a superman who would fuse politics with aesthetics and rise above the herd through sheer will to power. His writings would be transmuted into Nazi ideology after his death; his aphorisms—“the weak and unsuccessful must perish,” “the courage to do what is forbidden”—would become mantras.
Hitler needed an architecture to exemplify Third Reich ideals, German myth wasn’t enough. The country was lacking in prestige. There needed to be a greater origin myth for the Volksseele, so he turned to ancient Rome and Greece. When Alfred Ernst Rosenberg and Hitler claimed the Greeks as a “Nordic people” they were saying that the Greeks, Romans and Germans all belonged to a supreme Aryan race, from which Western civilization had descended. One of the most stupefying examples of this heritage mythos manifested as the Zeppelinfeld stadium, designed by the Third Reich’s architect of choice, Albert Speer. The stadium, which could hold about 340,000 people and which hosted the Nürnberg parades, was surrounded by 152 anti-aircraft searchlights that formed immense luminous pillars, a “cathedral of light.”
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The new age of Enlightenment in America—its fierce technological power, its systems of control, production, and consumption—has been waiting for a Romantic Übermensch to come along and repudiate its values of reason, science, and progress (values that are always declared but never maintained, whatever the epoch); a man who embodies Enlightenment domination—a neoliberal billionaire, a man set on the subjugation of humans and nature—who claims he is not a product of “the system.” America has been waiting for an irrational man who promotes irrationalism, who says “I will never tell you something I do not believe,” because what he believes supersedes truth.
His mythologizing grew stronger the more he gained power. By 2016 he’d call for a return to “traditional,” regressive values, an “American heartland” branded and commodified in T-shirts and red caps. He continues to sway a white electorate with calls of an ethnic national identity. He embodies mythology as white supremacists, growing in number and in power, value his sanctified Aryan blood: his presence conjures the return of European royalty. They find meaning in the blend of aesthetics and scientifically inaccurate claims, which elevate them and the white European identity that they so cherish. Neo-Nazis today see Prometheus in Trump; a populist demigod bringing power to (white) people.
And he has appointed himself the defender of Western civilization, battling those “from the south or the east, that threaten … to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition.” America won’t let those from “shithole countries” in, while Norwegians and [others] of beautiful Nordic descent are, of course, welcome. He has now hinted that he’d like to un-Americanize those born of immigrant parents: the Constitution prevents him from doing so, but this is a man who believes he can scribble all over it. If it were only up to him, “national essence” would be law again, signed by a man who sees himself—and is seen—as a mythical European white knight.” ~
https://lithub.com/the-aesthetics-of-the-dictator/?fbclid=IwAR1_I_ZCmR3vlDovwb7Di-QaEcYg4WbVrFdV4QcdznoQiWYK1T-zx0IPag4
A model of Hitler's plan for Germania (Berlin)
Oriana:
The articles rambles, but its best paragraphs are a reminder that dictators tend to share a taste for grand display and extravaganzas such as torch-lit rallies and military parades. Hitler didn’t go for gilded interior design, but sheer size impressed him — that seems to be the major mark of “dictator chic.”
And this is not confined to the West. Kings and emperors everywhere and throughout history all knew that ostentatious display was of essence, part of their claim to have the “mandate of heaven.”
I am somewhat reminded here of the contrast between the American and the Russian (Soviet, back then) embassies that I immediately saw when I lived in Warsaw. The Russian embassy was shabby — well, they were not going to waste their limited resources on impressing the Poles. But the American embassy, omg — talk about a grand display, starting with spectacular size (no other country had such a huge embassy in Warsaw). And looking at the two embassies, I knew that the Soviet Union was deep down a third-world country and no threat to the US. Appearances count.
Finally, let’s not forget the arguably most enduring dictatorship in history: the Papacy. The Pope is an absolute ruler, and the Vatican too has been well aware of the esthetics of grandeur and splendor.
Pope Innocent X by Diego Velasquez, 1650. How come I'm vaguely reminded of Lenin? “Innocent” is a particularly ironic papal name.
But Velasquez concentrates mainly on the Pope’s shrewd face. Here is a better display of the Vatican esthetics — now being toned down by Pope Francis. This is probably a mistake, just as Vatican 2 was a mistake, leading to less splendor and uglier, “Protestantized” churches. The only excuse for Catholicism is the esthetics of excess.
John-Paul 2 on the papal throne.
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Leonard Kress shared a sign in his neighborhood: “Alternate side parking suspended in observance of the Immaculate Conception.”
Juan de Valdez Leal: The Immaculate Conception with Two Donors
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“Do sheep and cattle owe civility to the butcher?” ~ Matt Flumerfelt
ABSTRACTION AND EMPATHY IN VISUAL ART
~ “Abstraction is often considered a Modern invention—and certainly, abstraction was reborn in the early 20th century—and yet abstract art existed alongside representational art in Paleolithic caves. Throughout history, representation and abstraction have generally alternated as modes of artistic expression, based on how a society felt toward the outside world. This is a point the art historian Wilhelm Worringer made in his groundbreaking book Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, first published in 1908.
Although Worringer’s book was the first serious assessment of what would become known as Modern art, it did not address Modern and abstract art per se. Worringer completed the text, as his doctoral dissertation, in 1906 (Picasso invented Cubism around 1907). Worringer was attempting to come to grips with why the artists of some cultures, such as ancient Greece and Rome, and some periods, such as the Renaissance, worked representationally, while others—the artists of ancient Sumer and Egypt, and of the Byzantine era and the Middle Ages, as well as of many primitive cultures—worked abstractly.
Worringer realized, while studying the ethnographic objects in the collection of what is now Paris’s Musée de l’Homme, that those earlier pared-down and abstract primitive artworks must have been thought of as beautiful and functional by their societies, and that we were wrong to force our own post-Renaissance European preferences about what art should or shouldn’t look like on art from other cultures, just because their artworks differed from the representational art we valued and called beautiful. Worringer, alongside many Modern artists, was questioning long-held received beliefs about aesthetics, psychology, sociology, and what was and wasn’t beautiful—what was and wasn’t “art.”
In accepting and acknowledging the mastery of those primitive objects—as Picasso did while looking at the same artworks in the same museum—Worringer came to believe that they were admirable works of abstract art and expressed a worldview, just as the representational art of the Renaissance also expressed a worldview. Worringer classified these two stylistic polar opposite views as abstraction and empathy. He argued that when we are comfortable in the world and our surroundings—as people were in ancient Greece and Rome and during the Renaissance—we tend to want to empathize with the world: to idealize it, and to re‑create the look, and especially the three-dimensional space, of that world in our artworks; we want to make objects that objectify our delight in the self. And when we feel uncomfortable, uncertain, and anxious in the world—as people did in ancient Egypt, during the European Middle Ages, and during the Modernist era—we tend toward a will to abstract from that world: to create artworks that suppress the look and space of our surroundings, that honor our inner unrest; these eras produce a state of alienation that we might describe as “an immense spiritual dread of space.”
The ancient Egyptians focused their whole lives on building their tombs in preparation for the afterlife, and ancient Egyptian artists worked basically abstractly for over 3,000 years. Ancient Egypt was the epitome of a culture focused elsewhere, living in a state of unrest. The art historian Erwin Panofsky, discussing the Egyptians’ obsession with the afterlife, wrote: “If we were, God forbid, sociologists, we might say that the entire Egyptian civilization tended to be ‘death-oriented’ rather than ‘life-oriented’; Diodorus of Sicily expressed the same contrast much better in the sentence: ‘The Egyptians say that their houses are only hostelries, and their graves their houses.’” This existential feeling of discontent and unrest reared its head again during the Industrial Age, when Modern European artists didn’t actually invent, but rather reinvented, abstraction.
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Artists often discover that, in their personal engagement with the language of art, they arrive at similar places. Consider Picasso’s linear images of bulls, created in the early 20th century, and those Paleolithic bulls drawn and painted 40,000 years ago on the walls of the Lascaux and Altamira and Chauvet caves.
Both Picasso and those Paleolithic artists convey the same writhing line, the same gait of the animal, the same paradoxical swelling between flatness and illusionistic volume. Both prioritize not necessarily the look of the bull, but the animal’s energy, movement, and life. Picasso and those anonymous cave artists wanted us to know that we are looking at a bull, but, more importantly—using the expressive power of line—they sought to convey to viewers the animal’s motion, volume, weight, strength, and grace; the rhythm and speed of its running legs; the shifting of its massive body, like ballast, within its skin. They wanted to capture something of its power and quickness, something closer to the bull’s life-force and spirit.
It may very well be apocryphal, but Picasso is often said to have told his guide, upon exiting the Lascaux caves, in France, or the Altamira caves, in Spain: “We have invented nothing new.” Of course, Picasso, who was among the most inventive of Modern artists, knew he had invented something new. But he also realized that, through his own journey of discovery and invention, he had arrived exactly where other artists had arrived before him. These discoveries, I imagine, both reassured and humbled him.” ~
https://lithub.com/abstract-art-didnt-begin-with-picasso/?fbclid=IwAR3TLY1baMjYuNR7GdkVXXqAnTc75Ic6JhLKUXuvpZ5FgVA3JIvZr6YbBFY
Oriana:
I’m not sure if the degree of being comfortable with the world can truly account for the prevalence of realism versus abstraction in art, but it's an interesting theory. A different theory about modern art is that the development of photography created a pressure for artists to offer something different, and thus they became non-representational. But that doesn't account for non-Western art, or archaic Greek art etc. What makes more sense to me is that the early "abstract" artists wanted to emphasize certain symbolic features. The article does mention that — the expressive aspect of art, trying to render meaning rather than to imitate nature.
Whistler: Symphony in White, 1883
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THE REAL STORY OF HANUKKAH
~ “In 200 B.C., the powerful Seleucid empire took over Judea, an area encompassing parts of what is now known as Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Greek-centric kingdom was founded by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s top military officers, and had steadily expanded outward from its capital of Antioch in modern-day Syria.
Some Jews embraced aspects of the Seleucids’ Hellenic culture. But when Antiochus IV Epiphanes ascended to the Seleucid throne in 175 B.C., he initiated an explicit program of Hellenization in the Jewish territory, promoting the values of worldly knowledge, physical beauty, hedonistic indulgence and polytheistic spirituality.
Antiochus’ measures were welcomed by some local Jews.
“The initiative and impetus for this often came from the locals themselves,” said Shaye J.D. Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard and author of From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. “They were eager to join the general, global community.”
For example, the Jewish high priest, who served as religious leader and political ruler of the semi-autonomous Judea, welcomed the construction of a gymnasium in Jerusalem, where Seleucid military officials practiced traditional Greek exercise in the nude alongside local Jews, including priests. Antiochus also encouraged the development of the Greek educational system in Jewish society.
A growing number of Jews began worshiping Greek gods, too.
The rising influence of Hellenism was not immediately a source of open conflict within the Jewish community. In fact, Hellenism permeated even the most traditional circles of Jewish society to one degree or another. A typical Judean would have worn Greek robes and been proficient in the Greek language, whether he was urban or rural, rich or poor, a pious practitioner of the Mosaic faith or a dabbler in polytheism.
“Becoming more Hellenized didn’t mean they were less Jewish as a result,” said Erich Gruen, an emeritus history professor at University of California, Berkeley, and author of Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. “Most Jews didn’t see Hellenism as the enemy or any way compromising their sense of themselves as Jews.”
So, What Went Wrong?
Eventually, Antiochus and his Jewish allies, including the high priest Menelaus, pushed the more pious Jews too far.
Menelaus embarked on a campaign of radical Hellenization in 167 B.C., prohibiting fundamental Jewish practices, such as circumcision, on pain of death. He also introduced foreign rites into the Jewish Temple, forcing Jewish pilgrims to sacrifice pigs, which are profane in Judaism. He built an altar to Zeus on top of the sacred altar to the Jewish god, Yahweh. Prostitutes were allowed to solicit their services freely on the Temple grounds.
It’s unclear whether Menelaus acted of his own volition with the Seleucids’ backing, on Antiochus’ orders, or some combination. Some scholars believe Antiochus’ efforts in Judea were part of an empire-wide attempt to consolidate his power by uniting the disparate territories under a common Hellenist banner.
Others argue that the king’s courtiers, most likely including Jewish officials such as Menelaus, put him up to it. Those officials may have sought to “reform their religion in the name of the king,” Cohen said.
But one way or another, the tyrannical measures were too much for traditional Jews, prompting them to fight rather than acquiesce to the authorities’ demands.
Cohen characterized these Jews not as zealots, but as “realists.” Until then, they had embraced many Hellenistic norms in their own lives and accommodated the spread of practices to which they objected ― such as foreign worship ― among their co-religionists.
Broadly speaking, the Jews of Judea can be divided into two camps based on their reaction to the prohibition of ancient Jewish rituals and the desecration of the Temple. The first camp, the pietists, were unwilling to comply with the radical measures and supported armed resistance against the high priest Menelaus. The second camp, the Hellenists, either welcomed the changes or did not care enough to fight them.
Pietist Jewish militants coalesced under the leadership of the Hasmoneans, a clan of Jewish priests that fled Jerusalem for the Judean town of Modi’in. Starting in 167 B.C., Judah, the third son of the Hasmonean patriarch Mattathias, led a guerrilla war against the Seleucids and their Hellenist Jewish sympathizers, along with his four brothers.
The Hasmonean brothers’ military successes earned them the nickname “Maccabees,” likely derived from the ancient Hebrew word for hammer.
It is not clear how many Hellenist Jews fought alongside the Seleucid forces in opposition to the Hasmonean-led militias, but the pietists certainly did not enjoy the support of all Judeans. Though the civil war did not break down along purely geographic lines, the Hasmoneans had a base of support in the countryside.
There were even some observant Jews who did not side with the Hasmoneans. Years into the war, the Seleucids appointed a new high priest in an attempt to calm tensions. A group of pious Jews accepted his leadership, prompting the Maccabees to malign them in their account of events.
Thanks to a series of cunning Hasmonean military maneuvers and setbacks for the Seleucids elsewhere in their empire, the pietist militias conquered the city of Jerusalem in 164 B.C. They restored the ancient Jewish rites of the Temple, tearing down the altar to Zeus and other pagan gods.
The word “Hanukkah” means dedication in Hebrew, referring to the Maccabees’ re-dedication of the Jewish Temple, which is believed to have taken place around this time on the Jewish calendar.
Judah the Maccabee chose to celebrate the re-dedication of the Temple for eight days, the same length of time that King Solomon celebrated the consecration of the First Temple.
The eight-day festival was an attempt to “refurbish [Judah’s] image in the light of the heroes of the past,” Berkeley’s Gruen said. “Putting himself in the mold of Solomon at the time of the building of the First Temple is part of the image that Judah Maccabee wanted to deliver.”
What About The Miracle Of Oil?
The miracle of oil ― the inspiration for most of the contemporary holiday’s key rituals ― did not even become a part of Hanukkah’s mythos until centuries after the military win of the Maccabees rebel army.
The traditional Hanukkah story is that when the Maccabees arrived to re-consecrate the Temple, it was in such disarray that there was only enough olive oil to keep the sacred seven-branch candelabrum (or menorah) lit for one day. Instead, the oil miraculously lasted for eight days.
Jews celebrate Hanukkah for eight days to commemorate this miracle, lighting an additional candle on a special Hanukkah menorah ― or Hannukiah ― each night of the holiday. That is also why it is customary on Hanukkah to eat foods fried in oil, like potato latkes and doughnuts.
In reality, the rabbis likely developed the miracle-of-oil narrative several centuries after the events of Hanukkah took place. The first mention of the miracle is in a passage of the Babylonian Talmud dating to some time between the third and fifth centuries A.D.
Harvard’s Cohen said he believes that the rabbis of the Talmud came up with the miracle of oil in order to “demilitarize” Hanukkah.
“It gave the rabbis, who were uncomfortable with the Maccabees, a way to say they respected Hanukkah,” Cohen said. “Military victory and upheaval was not a good lesson for Jews to have living under the Roman empire. They didn’t want little Jewish boys to grow up and try to be Judah the Maccabee and try to attack the Romans.”
The use of oil lamps, however, was a component of the holiday almost from the start. Jews celebrated the holiday with the lighting of lamps, according to Maccabees II, a pro-Hasmonean, second-century account of events included in some versions of the Christian Bible.
Josephus Flavius, a Roman-Jewish historian in the first century A.D., also refers to “festival lights” in his description of the holiday’s observance.
Contemporary Hanukkah
Hanukkah remains a relatively minor holiday for Jews. It is far less important than Rosh Hashanah and Passover, for example.
But it has an outsize status in diaspora Jewish communities, the largest of which is in the United States, where Jewish religious devotion often takes a back seat to a sense of cultural pride. That Hanukkah typically falls around the same time as Christmas has also raised its profile.
For many Jewish Americans, it is the quintessential example of that old adage said to summarize many Jewish holidays: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/real-history-of-hanukkah_us_585ea38ae4b0d9a594587fd3?fbclid=IwAR2M52t4DzocJux3U-1ChZAXuojQg0iULcfHUjbPS0-khOC5Qb81rIre3OA
Tilford Bartman:
If you read what historians say about this chapter of history, they paint it largely as a very nasty civil war between Jews who were largely from rural areas and had less contact with the Hellenists, and they wanted to keep pure. They wanted to practice and live a Jewish life relatively unaffected culturally or politically by the Hellenistic civilization that took root over that part of the world after Alexander the Great.
On the other hand you had Jews who tended to be more concentrated in Jerusalem and other more urban areas , and they were not opposed to political "collaboration" with the Seleucid Hellenists, and many of them were culturally radically assimilationist in regard to universal Hellenistic culture. Antiochus had many Jewish supporters, and Jews who fought with him. These people were deemed apostates.
This was a very nasty conflict, and people way back then, well over 2000 years ago, did not behave any better, and in fact sometimes in some ways worse than people do today who engage in such conflicts. One thing people did back then was boil people in water.
One way to look at it is that the people of Judea had to decide whether the universalistic culture of the Hellenists constituted a danger to their ancestral Jewish religion and its concept of God, or was it just a more modern way of progress and could be in some way merged with the practice of Judaism. My assumption is that almost all of my Jewish family and friends would have been among the latter not the former. So in Hanukkah they are in effect celebrating a victory by people who likely would have regarded them as apostates and subjected to them to some real nastiness.
Oriana:
Obviously modern mainstream Judaism is very different from the ancient Orthodox Judaism; it has adapted to modernity. If time travel were possible, the fans of the Maccabees would be appalled by it. On the other hand, historical Maccabees would probably strike us as ISIS-like fanatics.
~ “According to historian Elias Bickerman, Jason and Menelaus wanted to preserve aspects of Judaism that fit with Greek ideals, like a universal God, but to remove those parts of Jewish practice that separated Jews from others: dietary laws, Sabbath observance, circumcision. Some Hellenists continued to worship the Jewish God, but moved their worship to outdoor sanctuaries and sanctioned the pig as a sacrificial animal. It is interesting, however, that even in Second Maccabees, which is considered an anti-Hellenist tract, envoys representing Jerusalem at the quinquennial games in Tyre [the ancient version of the Olympics] “thought it improper” to purchase a sacrifice for Hercules. Instead they decided to fit out a ship and donate it to Tyre (II Maccabees 4:18-20). Although these Hellenists were willing to participate in the athletic contests, they appear to have been squeamish about doing something completely counter to Torah law.
The Maccabean struggle was also driven by issues of social class. Because only the wealthy — the urban ruling class and large landowners, led by the priests — were citizens, the “democracy” of the Hellenized Jerusalem polis oppressed the vast majority of Jews, who were powerless. Even before the Antiochan persecutions, social antagonisms existed between the zealots of the traditional faith — the urban craftspeople and village dwellers — and the free-thinking Hellenizers, suggesting that the Maccabees may have been liberators, but that they were also driven by some degree of self-interest.
In the end, the Maccabees must be judged to be both liberators and zealots. Like many figures in the Bible, these apocryphal heroes are multi-layered, and their meaning is unraveled by successive generations based on their own needs and experiences. In the world today, we may identify with the Maccabean fight to preserve Judaism in the face of assimilation and anti-Semitism, while at the same time working to mitigate religious zealotry that threatens to turn Jew against Jew.” ~
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-maccabees-heroes-or-fanatics/?fbclid=IwAR0IsPa603nAJskftuY2EfqCy6KzYW6DDJ-39Cc_zoWVkSH6a3xKkGtfXs8
“Spirituality isn't about what's real but what's comforting.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
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Maria
Callas at the ancient theater of Delphi, 1959. “Why should I be ashamed
to get more than President Eisenhower for a whole month for a concert?
Let him sing for God’s sake!”
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FEWER CARBS, MORE FAT: HOW TO PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S
~ “In a recent extensive study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the two most commonly prescribed medications for Alzheimer’s disease not only don’t work, but actually may worsen brain function. . . . Researchers from the Mayo Clinic revealed that deriving most of dietary calories from carbohydrates was associated with an 89% increased risk for either mild cognitive impairment, or full-blown dementia. In their study, those consuming the highest levels of fat actually demonstrated a 44% reduction in risk. And this is in-line with a New England Journal of Medicine Study showing how Alzheimer’s risk is increased in lockstep with blood sugar measurements, a reflection of dietary choices.
Higher levels of physical exercise translate into lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease as well. Even having good levels of vitamin D seems to be associated with a significantly reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
Eating few carbs, lots of healthy fat. Our dietary choices are hugely influential in our overall health, and perhaps nowhere else is this as evident as it relates to brain health. I limit my net carbs to around 30 to 50 g a day, and add in a lot of terrific fat in the form of extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, and wild fish. I also supplement with the omega-3, DHA, 1000mg each day, as well as MCT oil, 1-2 tablespoons daily. This diet, along with the MCT oil, helps to create ketones, a specific type of fat that’s extremely beneficial for brain function and protection.
Supplementing here and there. Other supplements supported by good science include vitamin D, whole coffee fruit concentrate, turmeric, a good probiotic, and B complex.
Working out daily.” ~
https://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/a25350420/alzheimers-prevention-tips
Coffee fruit, aka coffee cherry, extremely rich in antioxidants. It stimulates the production of Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor (BDNF), a
protein essential for maintaining healthy cognition and a host of other
brain-related processes such as sleep and mood
“Coffee fruit is hand-picked on coffee farms—as it has been done for over 1,000 years—and it is known by the farmers that the fruit is rejuvenating…and those who pick it have younger looking hands. This is because the fruit is high in polyphenol compounds: proanthocyanidins, chlorogenic acid, quinic acid, ferulic acid and caffeic acid. The fruit has been found to be higher in antioxidants than tea, vitamin C and E, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries and pomegranate.”
Oriana:
I don't take a probiotic, but I do eat fermented foods every day, and foods that contain resistant starch (pressure-cooked yams are my staple, and I'm always on the lookout for greenish bananas). Good fats — plenty. And I've lowered my protein — excess protein is turned into glucose, which is one reason why Atkins' diet doesn't work after a while.
This neurologist's diet is based on the idea of keeping blood sugar and insulin as low as possible. One clue is that Alzheimer's is sometimes called “brain diabetes.” Note also MTC oil — this is "liquid ketones." I prefer to use coconut oil, but have been looking into MTC as well . . . don't terribly like what's out there (plastic bottles, for one thing). There's also the yummy Irish grass-fed butter for the beta-hydroxy-butyrate.
But diet isn’t everything. We need to keep mentally active, and hardly anything does it so well as 1) creative work 2) socializing, especially if it includes giving and receiving affection.
ending on beauty:
At the cape, I stood alone on a platform
watching swans gather, mallards and herons,
and below me, a single hare, feeding itself
in the twilight on soft, newly mown grass.
~ Anya Silver, Cape May
Picasso: Absinthe Drinker, 1902. “My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso". 
The Eternal Feminine: A Ukrainian woman with a chick
Earliest known image of Nativity, 4th century; Milano, Sant’Ambroggio. Note the cow and the donkey — but no parents!
Hematite “Iron Rose,” Spain
Remedios Varo: The Troubadour
Boy angel at La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires
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Verdun: Military Cemetery and Ossuary
