stand surf-tormented shore is all we see, seem but a dream within a dream?
Adapted from the poem, A Dream within a Dream, by Edgar Allan Poe.
The poem was first published in the March 31, 1849, edition of the Boston-based story paper The Flag of Our Union, so says Wikipedia and I am too lazy today to challenge the statement so I will just cite it and be done with it.
Wikipedia also says, The poem dramatizes the confusion felt by the narrator as he watches the important things in life slip away. Realizing he cannot hold on to even one grain of sand, he is led to his final question whether all things are just a dream.”
Wikipedia cite’s that statement’s source as Dawn B. Sova’s book, Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. (New York: Checkmark Books, 2001).
May all things are dreams and as Big Bill has Prospero say, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on … ” (The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1)
Which I guess leads to the question, which comes first, the dreamer or the dream?
For the photo and something I may use later:
Shadows on the waves frozen on the phone moments caught once forever
Here is Mr. Poe’s poem.
A Dream within a Dream
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow — You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand — How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep — while I weep! O God! Can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?
“ … how could I still be informed while staying sane? Could I feel at peace when there seemed be an increasing amount of global instability?”
And she answered, “Then, I discovered the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of stoicism.“
According to wikipedia, “Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived, flourishing life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing certain virtues in everyday life such as courage or temperance and living in accordance with nature.”
The article was interesting and worth the 5 minutes that the website decided it might take me to read it.
I really liked her section being relaxed.
Relaxed is something I have always aspired to.
Relaxation is something I rarely find.
I guess I should have been a runner.
Not a jogger.
But a runner.
A sprinter.
As Sam Mussabini says in the movie, Chariots of Fire, “... a short sprint is run on nerves. It’s tailor-made for neurotics.“
Ms. Delaney writes under the heading, Be Relaxed:
The Greeks had a word for the state of mind we need to cultivate to remain calm: ataraxia.
Ataraxia is a state where you are free from distress and worry. Ancient philosophers believed achieving ataraxia created an emotional homeostasis, where the effect wouldn’t just be a more stable base-level mood, but one that would hopefully flow out to the people around you.
If you are more tranquil, you will be less likely to react or combust if something doesn’t go your way.
Imagine that your flight is delayed because of bad weather. You could react and take out your anger and frustration on the airline staff (who have no power to change the weather) or you could accept that the situation is out of your control – and remain calm and chilled.
With ataraxia, not only do you not ruin your own day, you avoid ruining other people’s too. In a tranquil state you may even make better decisions.
Ideally, someone in a state of ataraxia is not gripped by high emotions – such as lust, envy or fear. Rather, they have used the control test to understand what they can control, and what they can’t.
I had to look up how ataraxia is pronounced.
Say anorexia but swap Atar for Anor and you’ve got it.
Can’t wait until I tell someone I am embracing ataraxia and wait for them to want to check my weight.
I really like that last sentence.
Ideally, someone in a state of ataraxia is not gripped by high emotions – such as lust, envy or fear. Rather, they have used the control test to understand what they can control, and what they can’t.
More to the point, the last part of the last sentence.
… understand what they can control, and what they can’t.
I am not sure that those Stoic fellers in ancient Greece ever met Dutch people.
I won’t say that the Dutch part of me isn’t happy unless I am worrying about something whether I can control that thing or not but I will say, it sure feels like it sometime.
If nothing else to worry about, there is the weather.
And if the weather is nice, then, like the joke goes, Calvinism is the concern that someone somewhere in the world is having a good time.
Ataraxia.
… understand what they can control, and what they can’t.
In his book, That Time of Year (Arcade Publishing, New York, 2020), Garrison Keillor wrote:
My classmate Margaret Keenan, who became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She didn’t claim to heal people but to lead them toward some sort of understanding. I never heard her speak with contempt or derision about anyone, not even Death, whom she saw coming a long way off and met with serenity.
She didn’t claim to heal people but to lead them toward some sort of understanding.
That, for me, was about the best description of therapy I had ever read.
Lead them toward some sort of understanding.
And one of those things needed to be understood is what we can control and what we can’t.
Accept that the situation is out of your control – and remain calm and chilled.
I am not good at this.
Also if I am making that effort to remain calm and chill, forces outside my control seem to demand that I make an effort at gaining control of out of control situations whether such control is possible or not or maybe even if advisable or not.
Sometimes a level of plausible deniability is a good thing.
But I want to try.
And I will try.
I will shoot for achieving ataraxia.
A level of ataraxia that creates an emotional homeostasis, where the effect wouldn’t just be a more stable base-level mood, but one that would hopefully flow out to the people around me.
Ataraxic I guess.
Why not?
Hey, after the beach, who wants to go for a beer?
Just a November Day in the Low Country and looking ataraxic!
true believers just don’t see things the way they are because if they did …
Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are.
Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won’t see it…
True believers just don’t see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn’t be true believers anymore.
Philip Caputo in Acts of Faith, Vintage, 2005.
I am not pointing any fingers at anyone who anyone might be thinking of when they think of anyone who thinks they are the True believers.
Far be it from me to suggest that anyone who might be able support the candidacy of a person who is, shall we say, under the cloud of some 90 plus criminal indictments and at the same time is making a public claim of fraud where over 60 court cases have investigated and found no fraud, truly must be believing something.
To paraphrase Mr. Caputo, evidence contrary to the belief can be staring them straight in the face, and they won’t see it.
The act of not seeing marks them as the true believers far more accurately than anything I could accomplish with a little finger pointing.
nation conceived in liberty … under God all created equal
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow, this ground The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln’s remarks were made at the dedication of the National Cemetery on the Battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863, 160 years ago today.
This text, known as the Nicolay Copy is named for John G. Nicolay, President Lincoln’s personal secretary, this is considered the “first draft” of the speech, begun in Washington on White house stationery. The second page is writen on different paper stock, indicating it was finished in Gettysburg before the cemetery dedication began. Lincoln gave this draft to Nicolay, who went to Gettysburg with Lincoln and witnessed the speech. The Library of Congress owns this manuscript.
There are five handwritten copies of the text of the speech.
Two are noted as drafts and are named after Mr. Lincoln’s secretaries, the Nicolay Draft Copy and John Hay Draft Copy.
There is a great scene in history when then Secretary of State John Hay handed his copy to President Theodore Roosevelt who took the paper and forgot what he was holding and went to make several strong points, punctuating the air with the paper in his fist as he made his points, all the while his Secretary of State was trying to retrieve it.
Also interesting to note that when Mr. Roosevelt was sworn in as President, having had three years filling out the term of murdered William McKinley, he wore a ring that was lent by Mr. Hay.
The ring was fashioned to hold a lock of Mr. Lincoln’s hair.
But I digress.
Neither draft has the words ‘under God‘ after the words, that the Nation … in the last line.
Tradition has it that the night before the speech, Secretary of State William Seward talked Mr. Lincoln into adding the words at that spot.
The night before the big day, it was Secretary Seward who said, “… We shall therefore be united, only one country, having one hope, one ambition, and one destiny … this government of ours – the freest, the best, the wisest and the happiest in the world – must be, and so far as we are concerned practically will be, immortal.”
There are three more copies of the text, all in Lincoln’s handwriting, all written later in response for a copy of his remarks and all three have the sentence as, that the nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Interesting to be able to say that in the newspaper coverage of the day, the New York Times gave front page coverage to the events in Gettysburg that November afternoon and gave the full text of Mr. Lincoln’s short short remarks.
nothing but the truth the whole truth, truer, more true can’t handle the truth?
I was writing up a report for work that discussed the google’s analytics and web site performance data.
I had just written the statement that recent changes by the Google to their tracking codes and tags, called GA4, that reports on web traffic would be truer than before.
I stopped and rewrote the line to say ‘more true’.
And that didn’t sound right either.
But it got me thinking.
You start with true.
You start with truth.
That’s kind of ground zero.
Down to the nub.
The basic.
Truth.
As defined, the quality or state of being true, that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality, or a fact or belief that is accepted as true.
Can there really be degrees of being true?
More true?
Truer?
Truest?
Mr. Aristotle is credited with saying, “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.”
Boy Howdy but that helps a whole lot don’t it?
I guess it comes down to, what do you choose to believe?
Back to my web stats report.
BTW I usually start to work on these web stats reports by asking my boss, “What do you want the web stats to be?|
The Moth and the Star
A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star. He told his mother about this and she counseled him to set his heart on a bridge lamp instead. “Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,” she said; “lamps are the thing to hang around.” “You get somewhere that way,” said the moth’s father. “You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.” But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at dusk when the star came out he would start flying toward it and every morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain endeavor. One day his father said to him, “You haven’t burned a wing in months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your brothers have been badly burned flying around street lamps and all your sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on, now, get out of here and get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth like you without a mark on him!”
The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around street lamps and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught in the top branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.
Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
