blinding clarity how vital to live in a free society
My chance encounter with George Lincoln Burr was the greatest single thing that ever happened in my life, for he introduced me to a part of myself that I hadn’t discovered.
I saw, with blinding clarity, how vital it is for Man to live in a free society.
The experience enabled me to grow up almost overnight; it gave my thoughts and ambitions a focus.
It caused me indirectly to pursue the kind of work which eventually enabled me to earn my living.
But far more important than that, it gave me a principle of thought and of action for which I have tried to fight, and for which I shall gladly continue to fight the remainder of my life.
EB White in a Memorial Day speech at Cornell, May, 1940, reprinted in E.B. White: A Biography by Scott Elledge, (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1986).
According to Wikipedia, George Lincoln Burr (January 30, 1857 – June 27, 1938) was a US historian, diplomat, author, and educator, best known as a Professor of History and Librarian at Cornell University, and as the closest collaborator of Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell.
Wikipedia sites that Mr. Burr’s battles were in the Warfare of Science with Theology.
Not like today’s war with the current administration and a free society.
knowing that time stops when heart stops walk off the earth into the night air
Marching by Jim Harrison
At dawn I heard among birdcalls the billions of marching feet in the churn and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet still wet from the mother’s amniotic fluid, and very old halting feet, the feet of the very light and very heavy, all marching but not together, crisscrossing at every angle with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump into each other, walking in the doors of houses and out the back door forty years later, finally knowing that time collapses on a single plateau where they were all their lives, knowing that time stops when the heart stops as they walk off the earth into the night air.
As printed in Jim Harrison: The Complete Poems by Jim Harrison and Copper Canyon Press.
As it says in the preface – or epigram – or prologue or as it is labeled, Editor’s Note:
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble
You know, you gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble”.
what it must be like live where feel antipathy to your own country
In the article, The New Yorker at 100: ‘We live in a world of misinformation … a lack of verification. Our readers want what we do’, written by Andrew Anthony for the Guardian, the editor of the New Yorker Magazine is quoted thusly:
Even so, [David] Remnick says he’s not experienced anything before like the second term of Donald Trump.
“It’s not one event,” he says. “It’s 10 events a day. It’s 20 astonishing posts on Truth Social in a given week.
I lived in the Soviet Union for four years and one of the things that always emotionally struck me was what it must be like to live in a place where you feel such antipathy to your own country.
One feels a sense of shame to hear one’s own president brand a heroic figure like Zelenskyy a dictator, and to see how he deals in an opposite way with Vladimir Putin.
But how to cover that on a human level, on a factual level, on an institutional level, is a challenge.”
Growing up in America, I remember a joke told about a feller in China who wanted to move to America.
When he applied for his visa, he was asked, “Don’t you love your Country?”
“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Country!”
“Don’t you love your Government?”
“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Government!”
“Don’t you love your Leaders?”
“Yes!,” he said, “I would say I LOVE my Leaders!”
“So why do you want to leave?”
“I want to live somewhere where I DON’T HAVE TO SAY THAT!”
Why does it feel like we are going to find out what it’s like to live outside that somewhere.
what gets me going what wakes me up and alert trigger frustration
Anyone who reads these posts will know that I do not like getting up in the morning.
Of late it isn’t the getting up anymore that gets me.
I live in the low country of South Carolina where I found that I am sensitive to the spring pollen that coats the landscape for months down here and after a night of being vertical in bed, trying to sleep, it is with some relief that I get up in the morning so my sinuses will drain and I can breathe.
This morning, up early to breathe, I got to think’in.
My Dad was always bringing home odd things.
He was a dentist and he filled his waiting room with good magazines like Smithsonian, The New Yorker and American Heritage along with the usual waiting room magazines.
Famously one of us kids once left a copy of Mad Magazine in the waiting room once while waiting for Dad for something.
The next day Dad’s patients ripped out all the subscription blanks and one old guy telling Dad, it was the best magazine he had ever read.
In off hours Dad would page though these magazines and these odd ads would catch his eye and he would tear out these odd offers and send off checks and later come home with these odd things.
In my desk drawer I have a little telescope that is also a microscope which I always thought was some little toy thing until I used The Google and found that it was a MULTIFUNKTIONALE KLEINOPTIK EMOSKOP or a combined telescope, magnifier and microscope made by Seibert-Wetzlar, one of the finest optical manufactures in history.
I had to read the Google page to learn how to use it.
But where Dad found it and bought it, I have no idea.
Dad loved bird calls and had a drawer full.
One was the little red spool with a turn key that when turned, made different squeaking squawking noises which were supposed to call birds.
Not sure it worked but he carried one every where.
One time Dad came up with a skull.
Not just any skull mind you.
But a completely prepared medical training skull.
The jaw was spring loaded and on one side of the face the top layer of bone was removed to reveal what was below and on the other the surface bone was in place, but sections were hinged so they could lifted to show what was underneath.
The skull cap could be removed and all arteries, veins and nerve connections were marked out.
Why?
Why did Dad order this and bring it home?
I mean who looks through a magazine, there was no online shopping, and sees an ad for a prepared human skull and says, “I want that” or “My wife would love that”?
The skull didn’t sit out on the table or shelf like a lot of his stuff, but we would get it out to amaze our friends or to bring to school for show and tell.
You never knew what Dad might bring home.
There was this time I was watching TV with my brothers and Dad came in through the front door of the house, not the back door off the garage.
He noticed Mom was upstairs.
He left the door open, walked over and uplugged the TV in front of us and took it away to his car.
Dad came back in struggling to carry a much bigger TV, which he put in place and reconnected and turned on.
He looked at us and said, “Don’t say anything” and went back out the front door.
We had a new big TV and we didn’t say anything.
Dad came back after parking his car in the garage and sat down as if nothing had happened and enjoyed his new TV and didn’t say anything.
No one would have noticed but the next morning my baby brother Al looked at the TV for bit then found Mom and asked, “How do you turn the new TV on?”
You never knew what Dad might bring home.
He would have loved Amazon.
So why am I telling you all this.
I was thinking about that skull.
From this skull, I learned where the sinuses are in my head.
On bad pollen days down here in the low country, I could take a sharpie pen and outline on my face where it hurts and in my mind, I can see that skull, and I am outlining my sinuses.
Under my eyes, right under my cheek bones and above my eyes in my forehead, right under my eyebrows.
I get out of bed in the morning, and in my mind I can see my sinuses in my face tip as if I was tipping a sand glass, and feel the pollen drain away and air start to seep through.
So I get up.
I get up though I don’t want to, so I can breathe.
That is not to say, I wake up.
That takes some doing.
It takes coffee and a lot of coffee.
Since getting a new coffee maker with a bigger pot, I am back to 4 or 5 mugs of coffee, not sipped, but poured into my body.
And it takes my morning reading which takes less time than it did as I now gloss over any headline with the current president’s name in it.
After The Google News, the Guardian and the New York Times, I am starting to feel awake and more alert.
Time for the games and I start with the New York Times Connections.
It is 16 random words that you have to fit into 4 groups of 4 words over something they have in common in four guesses.
How the words are connected are rated into 4 categories.
The yellow grouping is easy.
The green grouping is less easy.
The blue grouping is hard.
And the purple grouping rarely makes any sense and you assemble these words because they are the only ones left.
I find that when I finish with Connections I am pretty much awake and alert.
I was thinking about this this morning after playing Connections as I was very much awake.
I had been thinking that this game had to be stimulating and really got my brain working.
I had been thinking that this game got me to think and to wake up.
This morning it hit.
All 16 words started with T.
I used up all my guesses quickly.
I lost and lost fast.
The answers were revealed and I read them over saying OH COME ON again and again.
No Haiku For You 