First Things
My apologies. The art is gone; so is the music. If you are careful and creative enough you may be able to find some of it somewhere on the net, but it probably isn't worth your time. I haven't an explanation for the dust that collected on my old page—I guess I just lost interest in those world wide webby things. Don't be too disappointed; I still paint and do graphics, and once in a while I take out the tracker and write music. When it's worth showing the world, it'll be here.
In the meantime (there's always less of it) I've been doing some reading, and perhaps you should be doing some too.
Essays, Excerpts, Etc.
I spent a number of evenings this year typing essays and chapters from books for my friends. I was surprised to find that it is an
excellent
way to read. It forced me to pay attention and work out every statement. Ideas and phrases that I might have otherwise glossed over called for my attention. Mortimer Adler suggests keeping a pencil or pen around to mark up books and call emphasis to certain phrases or sections for later reference; good advice, no doubt. But it just might be best to rewrite an author's words, to make them your own. Just as you'll never be quite sure whether shadows are blue and grass is purple until you put your brush to the canvas, you just might never know what an author's words mean until you try writing them yourself.
Jacques Barzun
Freedom and Risk
: "In a word, principles are at best shorthand summaries of what civilized life requires in general, in ordinary relations, in open-and-shut situations: do not lie, steal, or kill. But pure imperatives give no guidance whatever in difficult cases. Universal lying would be dreadful, but you do not tell the truth to the madman armed with a knife who asks which way his intended victim went."
On Baseball
: "Baseball is Greek in being national, heroic, and broken up in the rivalries of city-states. How sad that Europe knows nothing like it! Its interstate politics follow no rules that a people can grasp. At least Americans understand baseball, the true realm of clear ideas."
Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle
: "… it is the meaning attached to the word through variable uses which gives the impression that the word suggests in turn each of these quite different sounds. Usage, meaning, does the work."
The Search for Truths
: "The only sure thing is that mankind is eager for truth, lives by it, will not let it go, and turns desperate in the teeth of contradiction. That may be a noble spectacle, but it is tragic too—and depressing. If, as required, all truths must hang together consistently, it would seem that in religion, art, and the rest, truth has never reigned. Human beings begin to look like incurably misguided seekers for something that never was."
Toward a Fateful Serenity
: "History is concrete and complex; everything in it is individual and entangled. Reading it, mulling it over does not weaken concern with the present, but it brings detachment from the immediate and thus cures 'the jumps'—seeing every untoward event as menacing, every success or defeat as permanent, every opponent as a monster of error."
William Hazlitt
The Indian Jugglers
: "Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid. He must fill up a certain idea in the public mind. I have no other notion of greatness than this two-fold definition, great results springing from great inherent energy."
William James
On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
: "Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be."
Habit
: "The great thing, then, in all education, is to
make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
It is to find and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.
For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can,
and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work."
What Makes a Life Significant?
: "If it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your college, in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar of Russia's court."
Richard Mitchell
A Special Place in Heaven
: "Vera Mykolajiw 'teaches' experimenting with ideas to eighth grade children who are obviously not very good at spelling and grammar. They have, like Immanuel Kant, devoted seven years to not studying spelling and grammar."
Doing the Asking
: "… we can still tell our reader what to read. Anything. If only he reads closely enough to distinguish the writers who do the telling from those who do the asking, anything will serve him well."
Hunger in America
: "Literacy is not a knack. It is a moral condition. The ability to read attentively, reflectively, and judiciously is also the ability to be attentive, reflective, and judicious."
The Accidental Teacher
: "… there can be no teacher who does not learn, or learner who does not teach, any more than there can be people who breathe only in, not out. Who will not do both will do neither."
The Atheist Child
: "Here is the fundamental reason for all the shabby dodges and spastic fads of American schools: We don't want education. If we object to the indoctrination practiced in the schools, it is not because we hate indoctrination, but because we want to do it."
Timor Mortis in Academe
: "Such seems to be the nature of us all, that had we world enough and time without the certainty of death, we would see no reason to get ourselves together and tell our tales like sane and responsible authors, mindful of harmony and balance, and the permanent marriage of deed and consequence, of justice and injustice, and of that great and insoluble puzzle of freedom and necessity. It is only because Death will surely close the book that we scribble in it at all."
José Ortega y Gasset
Chapter 3
of
What is Philosophy?
: "Thus one of the obligations of philosophy is to take a theoretic position, to confront every problem—not meaning thereby to solve it, but to demonstrate positively that it cannot be solved. This is the characteristic of philosophy as compared with the sciences. When these latter meet a problem which for them is insoluble they simply cease to deal with it. Philosophy, on the other hand, admits from the start that the world may be a problem which in itself is insoluble."
Notes
The essays have been formatted using xhtml and css for easy reading both online and in print. If you find any typos or mistakes please let me know. Thanks.
